Downloads

Though it hasn't been updated in a couple of years, Xnews is free and has all the features most users will ever need. Based on another venerable but long unsupported news reader, NewXpress, Xnews offers automatic combining of multi-part binary messages, a fully functional preview pane for displaying jpegs and text messages, automatic deletion of messages from spammers (plonking), multiple server support, instant filtering as you type, and email. Probably my favorite Xnews feature is its unique ability to load any range of headers from a newsgroup. The mechanism is based on message numbers--not dates--so it's a bit difficult to simply load last week's messages, but with a little experience you can come darn close.

Xnews's interface isn't particularly pretty, and it's quirky enough that it will take you a couple of sessions before you're comfortable with it. Concepts like "catching up and purging" instead of deleting, and queuing articles before downloading them, aren't particularly intuitive. The odd behavior of the icon prefacing each message in a list also threw me for a loop until I studied the manual closely. Be smarter than I was and peruse said online manual before you get started.

Xnews is less than perfect in other ways. It's slow when dealing with large numbers of messages, it doesn't retain the current sort order between sessions, and it crashes every once in a while. But considering that it's free, those are minor issues. They affect me rarely enough that since I ditched Forte's overly complex Agent a couple of years ago, Xnews has been my newsreader of choice.

Note: (For a different opinion on Agent, see Ramon McLeod's download review.)

--Jon L. Jacobi