Free newsreader software for linux

XPN - X Python Newsreader project is a graphical newsreader written in Python with the GTK+ toolkit. I started writing it because I was learning Python language and working on a real project keeps your attention high.
XPN is distributed with the GPL licence, youll found a copy of the licence inside the XPN archive.
An interesting characteristic of XPN is the complete portability. I use it a lot on Linux and Windows, however XPN should work wherever Python and GTK+2 work.
With XPN you can read/write articles on the Usenet with a good MIME support (better than some well known newsreaders).
XPN can operate with all the most diffuse charset starting from US-ASCII to UTF-8. When you edit an article XPN automatically chooses the best charset, however is always possible to override this choice.
There also other useful features like scoring, filtered views, random tag-lines, external editor support, one-key navigation, ROT13, spoiler char ...
Main features:
On-Line/Off-Line Mode
- XPN has been for a long time an on-line only newsreader, now its changed. Starting from 0.2.5 I added the read articles storing, and starting from 0.4.0 you are able to download the whole bodies with the headers, or to mark for retrieval some articles and then download their bodies.
- Note that the download is a bit slow because I havent yet optimized this code, so the better way to use XPN is still with a local news-server, or if you have a DSL connection, directly online.
MIME Standards
- With XPN you can read articles coded with quoted-printable, 7bit or 8bit. XPN is also full UTF-8 compliant, you can read and send aritcles with the UTF-8 charset.
- Outgoing articles are coded with the best charset, however you can always override this choice.
Scoring
- Its possible to create scoring rules (like the Hamsters ones but simpler) in order to assign a score to articles. This rule can act on this fields: From, Subject, Date, Message-ID, References, Age, Xpost, Xref, Bytes and Lines
- You may also create action rules. These rules trigger an action to be applied on to the article. Possible actions are !kill (delete the article), !markread, !watch, !ignore and so on.
- Action rules act on the same fields listed above plus a new field named Score, in fact action rules are always applied after scoring rules.
Multiple Layouts
- Ther three different possible layouts for the main window. Probably in the future I will add more of them. You can also zoom one of the tree panes.
Colors
- Articles are shown with different colors for text, quoted text and signs. You can change this colors.
Random TagLines
- Its possible to automatically add a random tagline in your articles. TagLines are picked from a textfile that you can customize.
X-Face::
- Starting from 0.4.5 XPN support decoding of the X-Face and Face headers. Thanks to Andrew Taylor (author of a Javascript implementation of uncompface) for helping me in translating its module.
Internationalization
- Starting from 0.4.5 release XPN supports multiple languages. I use gettext (thank to Guillame Bedot) in order to mark and extract text string from the code
- If you want to translate XPN in your language just get the original strings file (xpn.pot), youll find it inside lang directory. Translate it with a translation software like GTranslator, KBabel or POEdit and send me the result. Please use UTF-8 as you charset.

Newsleech is a non-interactive rfc977 compliant news retriever. The commandline user interface is simple yet powerful. Newsleech is a powerfull and simple commandline newsreader. It is entirely written in C and it should be reasonably portable. Newsleech can understand scripts in addition to commandline options.
Main features:
- can retrieve news messages by means of a simple and powerful command line interface
- it can, in one run, visit several servers with several newsgroups with several sets ofarticles
- can concatenate this sets of articles and send the result to stdout, a file or a pipe
- can recieve its commands also from a script
Version restrictions:
- the program will never interpret any of the messages it receives

Newsx is an NNTP client for Unix. It connects to remote NNTP servers and receives incoming and outgoing articles
Newsx is also well suited for large spools with normal feeds, being used for pulling newsgroups from specific NNTP servers that are not distributed in the usual manner. Since newsx obeys the normal news spool configuration file and requires little or no specific configuration, the administrative burden should be minimized.
Main features:
- compatible with C News and INN local news servers
- configuration relies on standard C News and INN mechanisms for setting up newsservers and newsgroups
- setting of which newsgroups will be exchanged with which remote server based on sys or newsfeeds files, making administration easy
- logging of errors that occurred, as well as article transfer statistics
- optional log file for actual articles posted, and collection of posted articles in folders
- has been designed to be nice, so as not to overload the remote news server
- uses only standard RFC-977 functions, so should be compatible with the vast majority of news servers
- comprehensive error recovery for posting as well as for fetching; failed postings will be retried at the next opportunity, while fetching will resume at the point where it stopped
- refers to news history database to prevent fetching of articles already in the local spool. will not fetch crossposted articles more than once. does not rely on Xref, since many sites does not provide it.
- interface to popular news filters like Cleanfeed
Pulling news
News transfer via fetching to local news spools is sometimes claimed to be an inefficient way of transferring news compared to connecting newsreaders directly to the remote NNTP server.
The fact of the matter is that if set up and used correctly, exactly the opposite is the case.
A local news spool allows news transfer to occur at off-peak hours, thereby decreasing the host server load in the critical period. This will tie up less modems at peak hours, as well as decreasing the connect time since the actual transfer will run much quicker.
A fetch based system is also easier to administrate then the feeding kind, since every site decides for itself what groups it will exchange with whom. The major down-side is that article propagation times will be longer. For sites that are leafs in the news distribution tree, this is usually not very important.
Much of the problems connected with news pulling is connected to the use of the RFC-977 NEWNEWS command. Most news servers has implemented this command in an inefficient manner, which will put severe loads on the newsserver. Newsx does not use NEWNEWS.

Leafnode is a software package that implements a store & forward NNTP proxy (client and server) that supports TCP connections across IPv4 and IPv6. Leafnode can be used to give a regular newsreader off-line functionality, merge news articles from several upstream newsservers for newsreaders that only support one server well and avoid duplicate news download for a small LAN with multiple users reading news.

Leafnode is intended for use at home or in small offices. Scalability for large user or newsgroup counts has not been a design goal.

Leafnode is easy to install, requires no maintenance and can run unattended. It will recover from most problems without user intervention if possible. No configuration of a newsfeed at the upstream server is necessary, leafnode looks to the upstream server like a regular newsreader program.

Leafnode will automatically figure which newsgroups are read locally and will download them, and it will stop downloading from these newsgroups if they havent been read locally.

It allows for simple filters to limit the number of articles downloaded, the size or exclude articles with particular headers (Perl-compatible regular expression match). It has a mode to optionally download only headers in a first run, lets the user mark these through his newsreader (note that not all newsreaders will work) and download the full article texts in the next run.

Leafnode works perfectly with most common newsreaders either via NNTP or with traditional spool access.

Leafnode is an Open-Source package and runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and probably most Unix flavours.

KNode is a newsreader for the K Desktop Environment. It is GNKSA compliant (unfortunally a review is still pending), and has support for MIME and multiple servers.

It is a online-reader, but in combination with a local newsserver like leafnode also usable with dial-up connections.

KNode is written in C++ using KDevelop, a great IDE for KDE (thanks to the whole KDevelop-team for their excellent work).

nzbperl is a newsreader utility that can process an nzb file, autodecode, and do bandwidth throttling.
Run Linux (or OSX or Windows)? Need a multi-connection newsreader utility that can process an nzb file and autodecode and even do bandwidth throttling? Youve come to the right place.
I looked around for something that I could use for nzb files on my Linux setup, and I soon discovered limited options. There are progs out there that will download nzb files (nzbget and knzb are apparently the most visible ones), but none seemed to have a key feature that I put importance on: bandwidth throttling. So, like many other one-off hacks and open source projects, this little toy was built to scratch an itch.
Main features:
- Automated parsing and sorting of nzb files
- Supports multiple server connections
- Automated parts downloading, assembling, and decoding
- Decodes uuencoded and yenc encoded files (via uudeview)
- User controllable bandwidth throttling (even change speeds during runtime)
- Nice colored text display with progress information
- News server authentication (optional)
- Perl script requires no compilation.
- Few dependencies
- Small footprint (about a 57kB download)

Cone project is a text-based mail client. Cone seamlessly handles multiple POP3, IMAP accounts, and local mail folders.
Cone is also a simple newsreader. Cones interface is foolproof enough to be used by inexperienced users, but it also offers advanced features for power users.
Main features:
- An online tutorial provides a quick overview of Cones main features.
- A built-in text editor for editing new messages, with search/replace and spell checking (requires aspell or pspell).
- Shortcuts - assign frequently used text to a function key, or to an abbreviation. Insert the text by pressing the function key or typing its abbreviation.
- Supports UTF-8 consoles (requires the wide-character version of the curses library).
- Displays HTML mail, with automatic de-moronization ("smart quotes", and similar clutter, is replaced by plain garden-variety punctuation).
- Displays attached images, if invoked from an X terminal, by running Gnomes eog, or KDEs kview image viewer. Displays PDF attachments by running xpdf. Other, or alternative, helper applications will be added as time permits.
- After attachments are downloaded, they can be optionally removed from the message.
- Handles local mail folders, maildirs, IMAP and POP3 accounts, and Usenet newsgroups. All folders are shown in a hierarchical tree-like display.
- Supports access to servers through a Socks 5 proxy, using the Courier Socks 5 API toolkit.
- Sends mail using an external SMTP server (with/without authentication), or the local sendmail command.
- All network protocols support SSL/TLS and SASL (CRAM-MD5, CRAM-SHA1, and LOGIN).
- Address books (which can be stored in an IMAP folder).
- Remote configuration (share a common configuration between different instances of Cone).
- An optional "single sign-on". Use a single master password for multiple remote mail server accounts.
- PGP/GPG based encryption, and digital signatures. Sent messages are automatically signed. Different signing keys may be selected for different mail accounts, and the appropriate key is automatically selected when replying to a message from an account. Selecting a message for an encryption automatically looks up keys that match the recipients E-mail addresses.
- Import, export, forward and receive PGP/GPG keys as MIME attachments.
- When a single sign-on master password is installed, the master password also handles access to passphrase-protected keys.
- Cone shares a lot of its code base with the Courier mail server, which is why they share the same web site together.
- Cone also serves as a platform for development of a new experimental network mail access protocol, SMAP, that offers additional functionality not available with IMAP or POP3.
- Cone owes its versatility in handling a large variety of mail protocols to the fact that its based on LibMAIL, a generic C++ library that provides a high-level mail-handling API. Using the --with-devel configuration setting installs the LibMAIL toolkit, which allows for development of independent E-mail software.
Enhancements:
- This release fixes a bug in GPG signing of multi-part messages whose main content contains 8-bit text.