Forte agent

On Wed, 10 Jan 2018 10:48:24 +0100, occam wrote:

On 10/01/2018 01:08, Doomsdrzej wrote:
On Tue, 9 Jan 2018 14:01:52 -0800, Drew
wrote:

Curious to know which of the Forte agent versions people are using here.

8 here.

To be honest, I prefer Thunderbird but refuse to use it because
Mozilla has become a social justice company which donates to Antifa.


You /prefer/ Thunderbird? I've always toyed with the idea of Forte, but
find the integrated ('lazy') approach of TB for both email and usenet
more convenient. I have always wondered about the advantages (if any) of
a dedicated newsgroup tool like Forte. I normally stick to text only
posts, avoiding binaries or warez.

One of the biggest advantages of Thunderbird is that it uses plug-ins
so, if you want, you can decide to use something like GnuPG in a
newsgroup to ward off trolls. We did it with Snit in
comp.os.linux.advocacy for while. Since he refused to just go away and
some people refused to ignore the loser, some of us posted encrypted
text with GnuPG so he could essentially see our posts, but not read a
word of them. Of course, this also prevents anyone who isn't a regular
from seeing the messages either since the messages are only
unencrypted to those who were specifically selected by the poster.

However, even the keyboard shortcuts in Thunderbird are much better
than those in Forte Agent. A simple press of the spacebar goes to the
next unread post with TB whereas CTRL-N is necessary in Forte if you
want to see the next post _and_ download its contents. If you at the
bottom of a window and the next unread is at the top of it, CTRL-N
won't go back to it at all. It'll only chime to indicate that there
are no further posts even though you know that there are some..

Filtering with Forte is also pretty pathetic. With TB, you can create
IF, AND, OR rules very easily and intuitively whereas with Forte, a
proper filter requires you to read a manual. I made some effective
filters a while back but it was so cumbersome that I hope never to
have to do them again.