Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / January 2005

Mail can't read news.  Get a news reader.  There are quite a few of
them, and in the past week there have been 2 or 3 threads here or in
comp.sys.mac.comm where posters asked for recommendations.

You can't.  Mail is a mail program, not a newsreader.  In general, mail
programs don't make very good newsreaders.  Use a dedicated newsreading
program.  I don't like tin much either, but I do like text-based news
clients in general - I use trn4 which I am very happy with.  Most people
here tend to use GUI clients though.  MacSOUP seems to be popular, but
it's shareware.

Tim

Mail doesn't read news, just as iTunes doesn't store photos.  Most of
the "all-in-one" applications I've used don't really do any of the
tasks particularly well, and that includes Outlook Express.

Use Mail for Mail.  For News, you have many options, like
MT-NewsWatcher, Unison, Thunderbird (if you must do an all-in-one) and
many more.  Here's a good starting point:

http://www.newsreaders.com/mac/clients.html

www.macorchard.com will give you a list and description of the many
newsreaders available for the Mac.  Most are free.

Cathy

Hi Victor,

As others have already pointed out, Mail.app isn't able to read
newsgroups.  If you want a stand-alone newsreader, I think the venerable
MT Newswatcher is about as good as it gets.  But there are several to
try and you'll find the one that fits you best.

I also recommend Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org) for both email and
news combined (as well as RSS news feeds).  Thunderbird is the
stand-alone email client from the folks who brought us the Firefox Web
browser.  The recent 1.0 release of Tbird finally pulled me away from
Mail.app and because it also supports newsgroup reading I've been using
it to keep up on the handful of newsgroups I follow regularly.

   - Kevin

I'm using OSXnews ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/osxnews/ ). Its i
beta, and isa little flakey still, but not too bad

-everett