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Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

USEnet is alive and well, thanks. It doesn't need resurrecting; it never died.

I have a free account on Eternal September:

I use Thunderbird as my client. In T'bird >100 you get mail, including Gmail etc via oAuth, including calendar/contacts/tasks, you get News, and you get chat over Matrix. All in one app.

It badly needs spam filtering for its NNTP client, but it works a treat. Runs on Win/Lin/Mac just fine. Sync between instances is coming real soon now, MZLA claims.

I wrote about it:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/new_betas_of_firefox_...

View on HN

Same here with Thunderbird but I use these guys; https://Usenet-News.net

They are not free but they have a nice payment system; "A "Block Quota Account", or just "Block Account" instead means a pay-per-gigabyte account with no time limit;"

I do not use it much. I keep the alt.privacy subscription for the occasional jewel.

Thank you for the link!

Thanks for NNTP mention.

As an analogy a lot happened to HTTP and other protocols to increase user experience, better content deliverability, and control.

Can this be done to a modern NNTP protocol?

> As an analogy a lot happened to HTTP and other protocols to increase user experience, better content deliverability, and control.

On a protocol level, do you have any examples of what you're referring to when you say "increase user experience, better content deliverability and control?" Based on what I understand of the NNTP protocol, it allows for pipe lining commands to retrieve data, allows multiple, and persistent connections, and some commands will instruct the server to send compressed responses.

A simple HTTP example is content compression.

A header communicates whether the incoming payload is compressed and the algorithm used.

Backward compatible!

Better bandwidth utilization.

> [Thunderbird] badly needs spam filtering for its NNTP client

It already has the capability to filter newsgroup posts based on header and/or message body content.

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