[Richard Crowley]

"Absence" wrote ...
Thanks for all of the information, gentlemen.
What are your newsreaders of choice?

Also, I noticed the site has an RSS feed and I set it up in
Thunderbird. I really disliked it. I want to be able to see entire
threads and have them updated when I start the newsreader. I don't
want to see individual messages, or listings of outdated topics.

Again, I want all of the topics that aren't filtered out by spam
control to update when I start the app. Is there anything like that?

I use plain old OutlookExpress which is bundled with
most modern versions of MS Windows. I'm happy
enough with it that I have no desire to change. It does
not have the sophisticated filtering that others can do,
but the benefit tradeoff makes sense to me.

I've tried the top 6~8 of the freeware (and cheapware)
newsreader clients and found them all ugly, clunky,
counter-intuitive and/or regrogressive throwbacks to
decades-old text-based versions. Yuk. YMMV

My very small ISP contracts NNTP to Supernews and
that is what I use at home. My employer's NNTP server
no longer hosts external newsgroups (only internal ones),
so I use individual.net which is a text-only (no binaries)
news server in Berlin. Costs 10 Euro per year (~ 1USD
per month). It would be well worth twice the price to
avoid the horrible Google Groups web-based UI.