pan
Latest reviews
Perfectly useable, but not as stable as Thunderbird Mail. It unexpectedly shut down or froze on me a few times for no discernable reason. It took me a while to wrap my head around using Thunderbird as a newsreader, but was worth the effort as I now think it's the best newsreader I've ever used. I recommend Thunderbird over this one.
A bit buggy and dev is just about frozen, but this is still superior to the latest version of Windows's Forte Agent in some respects! For instance, pan will remember downloads if the computer loses power or restarts. Agent simply forgets 'em. The web site may have a more updated beta version available.
Pan works as promised except I can't find a "use SSL" box to check in order to use port 563 for encrypted traffic. Pan opens using Port 119 (unencrypted) but if you switch to Port 563 and close Pan, the connection to the news server (Giganews) is lost when you re-open Pan. On re-opening you see it is still showing 563 in the connection settings and you can't connect until you switch back to 119. From this I assume no encrypted connection is ever established. If anyone knows a sure way to get SSL working on Pan please shoot me a message. The Pan documentation wasn't very helpful.
Pretty straight forward to use GUI. Great group & article search filtering - better than I remember with MicroGravity and Forte Agent. I'd recommend changing some settings to prevent immediate retrieval of headers. Only limitation I've found is not allowing completely separate group lists for different newsservers - confusingly it merges them all together.
Very nice reader: very good spam filtering (using RegEx), competent attachments handling, good at dealing with text groups. A few bugs here and there. (version 0.136-1)
Excellent - though I used it when I was in Ubuntu. Now I'm here cos its better than Ubuntu alone!
I used Agent for Windows before switching to Linux. Pan is a easy to use, suitable replacment. One less reason to keep a Windows installation around.