Newsgroup clients expand repertoire

MacWeek, Feb 2, 1998 by Andrea Dudrow

Asar Corp. in January announced a beta version of Hogwasher, an Internet newsgroup reader that the company said will make sending and receiving e-mail and Usenet news faster and easier. In addition, John Norstad updated his Usenet client, NewsWatcher.

Hogwasher has provisions for both online and offline news reading; the program lets users schedule connections and uses filters to download only articles relevant to that individual.

In addition, the package lets users combine related newsgroups into a single subscription; Hogwasher will delete duplicate articles, the company said.

Asar said Hogwasher automatically decodes binary attachments, reassembling those that have been split into multiple pieces. The software supports the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard.

Other Hogwasher features include a built-in JPEG viewer that Asar said can be used to preview downloaded images and security features that can control access to newsgroups, e-mail and binary files.

Hogwasher will be available within the next few months and is expected to cost about $49. The public beta is available now from Asar's Web site.

In other newsgroup news, shareware author John Norstad updated his free Usenet client, NewsWatcher, to Version 2.2.

The new version renames commands for new postings, follow-ups and e-mail replies. It improves checks for large cross posts and decreases the limit on the number of cross posts to 20 groups, from 50. NewsWatcher 2.2 also improves checking and truncation of the References header, the developer said.

Asar Corp. of Rochester, N.Y., can be reached at (716) 436-5760; asar@asar.com; http://www.asar.com.

NewsWatcher, which is not in active development, is available at ftp://ftp.nwu.edu/pub/newswatcher.