Existing users, 
 MaxNews-X - 1.1.1Usenet newsreader (NNTP) client |
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Product Description:
MaxNews is a Usenet newsreader for reading and composing both news articles and e-mail messages built from the ground up around one of the fastest SQL database engine with full unicode UTF-8 support. MaxNews provides the user with an all-in-one interface, is fully MIME-compliant and supports reading and composing messages using any charset that your system supports.
Operating System Requirements:
This product is designed to run on the following operating systems:
- Mac OS X 10.3
- Mac OS X 10.2
- Mac OS X 10.1
- Mac OS X 10.0
Additional Requirements:
- Mac OS X
Screenshots:
Download Links:
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Featured Reviews
Still not ready, more than two years later... - Version: 1.1.1, 4/8/2007 05:50AM PST
(1 of 1 users found this comment useful)
mfwills
Not quite ready 
- Version: 1.0, 2/16/2005 03:33PM PST
(3 of 3 users found this comment useful)
reowen
I tried MaxNews today because I realized I may have to go to SSL authentication and it offers support (untested by me). I wasn't very impressed...
It took a VERY long time to download the full list of groups from my server (many seconds per 100 groups, whereas MT Newswatcher can fetch the whole list of 8400+ groups in a few seconds). This is over a high speed link; I hate to think what it would be like over a slow connection. Worse, the process never terminated, but instead got stuck at "closing connection". After 10 minutes or so I hit the Stop button; this did quit the download quickly and seemed to leave me with a full list of groups.
I then subscribed to some groups. That was surprisingly clumsy because the list is flat (unlike MT Newswatcher, which shows a hierarchy), the search function is not "live" and the list does not allow multiple selection or dragging to subscribe.
Still, most people don't mess with news groups very often, so this may be no big deal. Unfortunately seemed in keeping with the rest of the application...
I was also disappointed in preferences. There aren't very many and some are really hard to adjust. For example you can adjust some settings for each news group (by double-clicking it) but I found no way to adjust settings for all groups at once (for example you cannot select multiple groups).
I then tried to read some news. Clicking on a newsgroup said "no messages to display" (instead of fetching headers as I expected). However, I found a control to fetch news, at which point it proceeded to try to download every message in the group (not just the headers)! I halted that and looked through a bit of what it had and it looked fine. But I don't much like the idea of fetching all news because I usually only read a small fraction of the available postings.
On the good side, this claims to do SSL, message filtering, support for multiple news servers -- all very good things. Also, I only used this for an hour and may have overlooked some things. I hope future versions improve usability, because this has promise.
It took a VERY long time to download the full list of groups from my server (many seconds per 100 groups, whereas MT Newswatcher can fetch the whole list of 8400+ groups in a few seconds). This is over a high speed link; I hate to think what it would be like over a slow connection. Worse, the process never terminated, but instead got stuck at "closing connection". After 10 minutes or so I hit the Stop button; this did quit the download quickly and seemed to leave me with a full list of groups.
I then subscribed to some groups. That was surprisingly clumsy because the list is flat (unlike MT Newswatcher, which shows a hierarchy), the search function is not "live" and the list does not allow multiple selection or dragging to subscribe.
Still, most people don't mess with news groups very often, so this may be no big deal. Unfortunately seemed in keeping with the rest of the application...
I was also disappointed in preferences. There aren't very many and some are really hard to adjust. For example you can adjust some settings for each news group (by double-clicking it) but I found no way to adjust settings for all groups at once (for example you cannot select multiple groups).
I then tried to read some news. Clicking on a newsgroup said "no messages to display" (instead of fetching headers as I expected). However, I found a control to fetch news, at which point it proceeded to try to download every message in the group (not just the headers)! I halted that and looked through a bit of what it had and it looked fine. But I don't much like the idea of fetching all news because I usually only read a small fraction of the available postings.
On the good side, this claims to do SSL, message filtering, support for multiple news servers -- all very good things. Also, I only used this for an hour and may have overlooked some things. I hope future versions improve usability, because this has promise.
I LIKE:
In MT-Newswatcher, the very act of reading a message marks it for deletion, assuming you will never want to come back to it, and you cannot get it back unless you start over with all of the group's messages. MaxNews allows you to read a message, but retains it until you actually delete the message or even a whole thread.
I SEMI-LIKE:
Deleting an article moves it to the trash, where it is no longer in the active thread display, but it is still available if someone posts another article in the thread. All of the trashed articles are there to be reviewed.
I DON'T LIKE:
Threads display a little blue dot with a number, ostensibly indicating how many new, unread messages are in the thread. The problem is that it is not very good at updating that symbol once you have read the message. Sometimes the blue dot goes away once all messages have been read, sometimes it doesn't. Ever. Unless, of course, you delete the thread.
Connection logs. MaxNews insists on an entry every time you retrieve or post. Unless you have some need for these files, they are just something else to take up space on your computer, and there's no way to stop it. Select them all and delete them, and they are moved to the app's trash, where you than have to select them again (because they are mixed in with "deleted" articles) and delete them a second time, and watch as they go away one......by......one. The connection logs all have that handy blue dot, so you know which ones you've read (as if).
Lack of filters. There's a place where you can create rules if you want to block a spammer or a troll, but once you've gone to the trouble of doing that, clicking "OK" does nothing. You have to click "Cancel" to get out of the dialog, the effect of which is obvious.
Lack of preferences. You can set your identity (name and email address), connection info (server, user name and password) and the ISO character set, and there are some group-by-group preferences, such as when to purge articles (I assume this means fully removing them from the temporary Trash). I would like to be able to tell the program that I don't need or want connection log entries.
New posts. Followups (responses) to posts work fine. My user name and email address (albeit bogus) are made part of the posting, as if the app knows who I am. If I create a new article, I have to enter that information manually, because the app doesn't really know who I am.