Re: Mail serve

Mark J cleary wrote:

I am an old-school Thunderbird user still. It allows me access to Eternal Sept to read this newsgroup. Not even sure if news groups are even used anymore we seem to be a bunch of crazy old cyclist.
 Thunderbird is good but slow and I would possible like to go to Outlook but it will cost $70 a year. What are you all using for your email program and getting the newsgroup. Pretty sure Andrew is doing what I do but maybe not for all email.

I still use Mozilla Seamonkey -- mail, news and browser, although the browser is getting more difficult to use for general browsing. For Usenet, I also use eternal-september.
If you're having performance issues with Thunderbird, the issue is not necessarily Thunderbird directly, but stuff going on in your user profile. I don't know how many newsgroups you subscribe to, but if the number is relatively small, take a try at rebuilding the indexes.  To do that, right-click on a newsgroup and select "repair folder".  That will also cause Thunderbird to re-download headers that are available on the server. e-s has a short enough retention that there's probably no reason to not grab everything.
If you're still having problems, you might want to try setting up a new profile.  In Windows, the way to launch the Profile Manager is thunderbird -p and then make sure you tick the box to have Thunderbird give you the Profile Manager each time you start.  Then configure what you need.
Many years ago, Outlook Express was actually a good news client, but that's been abandoned long ago by Microsoft. Still, I occasionally see Usenet posts that apparently have come from somebody using Outlook Express.
Microsoft has the annoying habit of re-using product names and applying to products that may not be related to previous products with the same name.  Outlook is the worst.  Right now, they've blended Outlook as a product with Outlook as a service. For individual users, they're trying to promote outlook.com (the service) with the Outlook client (pre-installed in Windows or bundled with Microsoft 365 subscriptions, but there's nothing that requires you to use one with the other.  Thus, you can use Thunderbird with outlook.com (which I do occasionally with work mail) or the Outlook client with any email service that you want.
However, whether client or service, newsgroups and the NNTP protocol are ancient history in the perspective of Microsoft.
If you're considering your email, I do encourage use of paid services that aren't trying to exploit your activities to sell to advertisers. Besides the obvious ones, such as Microsoft, Gmail and Yahoo, I would also discourage use of "free" value-added email provided by connectivity providers (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, etc.), as those providers have mostly lost interest in email. I know th at with AT&T and Verizon, they've outsourced their email to Yahoo (although partially retaining their own branding).  But with a paid service, they'll generally answer the phone if you call them with a tech support question.
Smith