No one said you cannot use an offline reader in combination with
an intelligent downloading process. You already mentioned using
trn's killfiles, which eliminate the junk before you're going to
download it. It is also possible (and VSoup already has it, IINM)
to do this filtering in the program which downloads the messages
for you.
This is not a limitation of offline news readers. My trn/uqwk/yarn
combination works good enough for me. Others may want to use VSoup/yarn
to filter unwanted news, or even a program like Agent to do it all
with one program.
The main benefit of an offline reader is that it saves online time.
If you have a leased line, fixed-rate local calls, 0800 numbers for
your Internet access, or anything like that, then you won't care if
it takes a bit longer online to get the news you want. If you have
a dial-up line, or you pay by the minute (like me), then you'd most
likely appreciate any solution that saves online time. It is much
more relaxing if you can just download a big pack of news, then take
the entire day to read it.
Greetings,
Arnoud
--
\/ Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet - galactus@stack.nl This space
5th year Business & Computing Science student left blank
URL: http://www.stack.nl/~galactus/ PGP: 0x416A1A35 intentionally.