Binary NewsReader Recommendations?

[isochar]

I'm currently using FreeAgent, but the huge increase in Yenc stuff has limited its usefulness. I've already tried the three replacements:

NewsShark
Giganews
Xnews

NewsShark is excellent, if only it would mark whether a message attachment had been downloaded...

Any other recommendations for a NewsReader?

[Gurm]

I have always preferred Gravty to Agent.

Microplanet have gone out of business, and released Gravity to the Public Domain - and the new versions (Super Gravity) support yEnc!

Tom's Gravity Pages (No, not THAT Tom)

[orangejulius]

<a href="http://www.xs4all.nl/~js/gnksa/gnksa-evaluations.html">GNKSA</a> Ratings:
GigaNews: unrated, spammer's choice
NewsShark: unrated, not free
Gravity: 70%
Agent: 82%
Xnews: 100%

What don't you like about Xnews?
It seems to do everything you've asked for so far.
(yEnc support, marks whether attachment has been downloaded)

[isochar]

I didn't like the Xnews interface, specifically the way it queues up files. (Other clients can just highlight and add it to an auto-download batch) Also, it doesn't seem to support auto-saving files into folders named after the group. They manual folder creation and queueing is a PITA. I guess I'll give Xnews another try and see if I can adapt...

I found another client, Newsbin. Pretty good, one commendable quality is that it's multi-threaded. (Definately can tell the difference)

[Helevitia]

NewsShark is excellent, if only it would mark whether a message attachment had been downloaded...

Except for the gator sfotware it forces you to use which is spyware. This is the reason I dont use it anymore. It was a great program before gator ruined it. Damn spyware

Dave

[isochar]

The trial version of NewsShark I installed didn't force it.

[isochar]

Here's another NewsReader:

http://www.shemes.com/grabit/

So far I can say it has a really clean interface, and looks like it's geared for downloading attachments...

[Tom]

I've always really liked Gravity (and MicroPlanet Gravity)
and I'm currently using the free version (2.5.0.2000)
that Gurm mentioned.

[Gurm]

Yes, and there's an update to the free version called "Super Gravity", which fixes tons of bugs and whatnot.

What I don't like about other news readers is purely an interface issue. Agent irritates me, especially its difficulty of configuration. XNews _REALLY_REALLY_ irritates me.

*shrug*

I like being able to right click a group (or a group of groups), pick "decode" and walk away, confident that not only will all the binaries get decoded, but the multipart messages will be correctly joined, and yEnc'ed files will come through properly.

- Gurm

[xortam]

I haven't been able to get to Tom's Gravity page (didn't these guys go belly up yesterday?). I did some searching yesterday and found Gravity 2.3 and 2.5 along with some plugin. Is 2.5 the latest version? Does Gravity combine ill-named messages correctly? i.e. 1/125 vs. 001/125: Outlook isn't able to sort such messages sequentially. What does yEnc buy you? I've been really happy using RAR, PAR, and SPV files lately for the most assured downloads.

[isochar]

Here's Super Gravity 2.6:

http://lightning.prohosting.com/~tbates/gravity/super.html#download

yEnc is the new standard for transferring attachments over newsgroups. (UUEnc was the most popular, I believe) ie. Someone posts a .rar file using yenc to alt.binaries.whatever

[xortam]

Okay ... so I decided to do on search on yEnc and found their site ... http://www.yenc.org/ and the faster mirror site http://www.winews.net/yenc/index.htm. Presumably, yEnc takes care of the following UUencode deficiencies:

Size and Overhead:
The 'conventional' encoding adds 30-40% overhead. Encoded messages are far longer than the original binaries. This results in higher bandwidth requirements for Usenet and more storage capacity as both the decoded binary and the encoded message need to be stored
A new encoding should use the fact that news-servers can easily transmit true binary data in message bodies - except of the NULL, CR & LF characters.

No error-checking:
The 'conventional' encoding has no information about the correctness of the content. The enduser cannot determine if the messages has been corrupted during transit or but the storage system. Usenet has increasing problems with corrupt messages (status Oct/Nov 2001). A new encoding should add at least size and CRC values to encoded messages

Bad multipart detection:
There is no 'standard' for multipart posts. The 'usual' method: "Find something in brackets as (1/20) and find all similar subject lines which are identical except of this bracketed counter" is unreliable and not consistently used. Sometimes messages have two (1/n) or are using square brackets [1/20].
A new encoding should have a fixed format for the filename and part indicators - and still permit the neticens to include their prefixes and additive texts.

They also have a number of stand-alone decoders on that site.

[isochar]

Originally posted by Helevitia


Except for the gator sfotware it forces you to use which is spyware. This is the reason I dont use it anymore. It was a great program before gator ruined it. Damn spyware

Dave

Finally found out what you're so pissed about.
1.1.1 has the advert.dll, 1.1.2 (current) does not. Difference is that 1.1.2 is trialware, whereas 1.1.1 was not.

[isochar]

Here are two other binary downloader I ran across:

http://www.daansystems.com

http://www.zeonews.com (Used to be NewsGrabber)

Been using both for 10 minutes, and I think one of them will be a winner!

*edit* Looks like I found a good third NewsReader, Binary News Reaper @ http://www.co.jyu.fi/~ap/bnr.html (This one is *really* simple)