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This week we will take a look at our old friend Thoth, but with a new twist, downloading
messages and storing them locally – so they can be reviewed when disconnected to the Net.
But before we dive into Thoth, I want to note the release this week of Microsoft
Office:mac v. X for Mac OS X. The email client in Office, Entourage, also supports reading
and posting messages to Usenet news servers. While the news reading features of Entourage
are not reason enough on their own to justify purchasing Office, they are reasonably
complete, and rich enough for a many users. If you have access to Entourage X, it is
definitely worth your time to check out the newsreader support. As I've noted before, one
of the main reasons I like use Entourage is not for reading, but posting. It can maintain
a well-organized folder of sent messages better than clients that store outgoing messages
as individual files in the Finder.
Let's return to offline message reading. Most early newsreader clients came out of the
academic environment, where full-time network connections were the norm. As a result, most
newsreaders were initially designed only to work interactively while connected to the
Internet. In some early versions of NewsWatcher, you could not even launch the program
without an active Internet presence; otherwise the Mac would crash. Those days are long
gone, but the interfaces of most newsreaders still treat offline browsing as a sidecar.
That is unfortunate, because most users still access the net via dialup modems. And even
with the death of per-minute connect time charges, there are still often toll call charges
to manage or simply the desire not to tie up the family telephone line for hours on end.
Thoth's ability to work offline centers on two commands in the News menu, "Mark Kept" and
"Mark Unkept." Here is how it works. Any article marked as kept is downloaded onto your
hard drive, and can be read within Thoth even when offline. By changing the "Keep Headers
Only" preference setting either globally or in a specific news group, you can choose if
the entire article is downloaded or simply the header.
Keeping headers only allows you to download huge batches of message subject lines, which
can be reviewed offline, and marked for complete retrieval the next time you are online.
That trick is especially handy if you move between work sites, and occasionally have
access to a fast net connection.
Once you have kept a batch of messages, either headers or complete articles, you need to
switch Thoth into offline mode. There are several ways to do this: hold down the shift key
during launch, or set the application preference to always launch in offline mode, or
select Go Offline from the Special menu. Once offline, the current available unread
messages disappear from the group lists, however you are still able to open any group
marked with a diamond and either read the message (if downloaded already) or mark for
download during the next connection. If the diamond appears hollow; that means that the
kept messages are already marked as read.
This quick overview should be enough to get you started, but we will visit this subject
again, looking at a number of other interesting possibilities for improving your news
reading experience with offline message capabilities. Until then, see you online!
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"Cutting the cable: how to work offline"
