Newsgroup Browsers

What's the best newsgroup reader? I have not yet found one all purpose, excellent newsreader. It just doesn't seem to exist.

However, there are some excellent clients available ... they are just not good for everything.

I use Newsgrabber for binary posts. This little shareware program is by far the best client for this purpose that I have found. Just enter what groups you want and tell it to go. Within a short time you will have all of the binaries in the group downloaded to a directory.

For text posts, I have found that Outlook Express 5 is the best. This comes with Internet Explorer 5.

A very popular newsgroup browser is "Free Agent".  I've played around with this one for a while, and I don't like it.  The interface is complicated, non-intuitive and clumsy. However, many people swear by it.

Perhaps the easiest option is simply to create an account on "Deja News". This allows you to read from and post to newsgroups using your standard internet browser (IE or Newscape). The disadvantage is no binary's are accepted.

Both "Deja News" and another web-based service called Remarq allow you to examine old postings. This can be useful as most newsgroup servers get so much data that they delete it within a matter of days (sometimes hours for large binary groups).