Don Pyeatt wrote:
Not so fast....this is not a yEnc thread. I just want someone to
answer my question about news and email clients.

Why is OE inferior to other clients?

It is beginning to appear that no one can answer it.

gdp



Poking my head above the trench for the first time on this, I _prefer_ OE.


I've been using it for years, (since '91 or '92) I've also tried other
clients such as Free Agent, Thunderbird and XNews.


Quite frankly, none of them made my day sufficiently easier, to make it
worth the trouble of learning a new program.


Thunderbird was pretty - but the message folder was over twice the size of
OE's, I have about a Gb of stored messages with OE and about 2.4Gb with
Thunderbird.


Some of these other newsreaders have all the features of OE, but do their
'thing' slightly differently. One of them (I can't remember which)
was difficult or impossible to tag and download messages selectively (I'd
have to download every message on the group, first).



Quite frankly, I still download and install the very occasional new version
of the above list, but nothing I've seen convinces ME that it's worth the
switch.



If the others were as good as some people seem to attest, then the whole
planet would have taken on these wonderful, free packages - but that hasn't
happened.


Why is that ? Some of us are boring old farts, that are resistant
to change - a lot of us have seen this all before, this isn't our first
time around the block.



yEnc ? Use it if you want, I personally don't give a crap.
My OE filters out most of it, so it doesn't worry me.


Some of the yEnc files that do slip past the filter (because they're not
labelled in the header) seem to be overly large pictures anyway, HUGE damn
files that should have been resized properly, no matter what encoding method
was used. The only justification offered was that "they would be
even larger in Mime or UUencode"


There are still people on dial-up - their opinion matters. As
technology moves on, more of these people are going over to broadband,
making the one advantage that the yEnc enclave hold very dear, increasingly
redundant. Bandwidth gets faster and cheaper every year - it's been
doing that since my first 1200bps modem and I don't see that trend changing.


My personal opinion, for those who are still reading this far ..... is
that yEnc is a solution in search of a problem and not enough of one for me
to migrate all of my mail and news activity over to a new platform - it's
not always as easy or as important as some people think.



But of course YMMV.


--

Cheers

Dave Kearton