Netscape Communicator Messenger and Newsgroups Forrest Stroud
Messenger and Newsgroups
Next to the Web browser, the two Communicator clients most likely to be used on a regular basis are Messenger and Newsgroups -- although with the decline in popularity of Usenet newsgroups, the Newsgroups client is likely to be used far less often than the Messenger tool. Both clients are updated versions of the mail and news clients included in Netscape 3.0.
New features in the Messenger client include an integrated spelling checker, mail filters (solid but nowhere near as powerful as those included in IE 4.0's Microsoft Outlook Express, Pegasus Mail, Pronto Mail, and several other mail clients), IMAP4 support for server-based management of mail, inline support for message encryption, intelligent HTML sending/receiving capabilities, HTML message composition tools (using the Composer client), global address books (using three popular people search engines), and a revised interface. The only major drawback of Messenger is that it lacks support for multiple POP mail accounts.
The Newsgroups client offers an entirely new interface for reading news groups; it can also be integrated into the Messenger interface allowing the two clients to work together or separately at your option. Like Messenger, the Newsgroup tool lacks advanced filtering capabilities and is rivaled by several independent clients (including Agent and MicroPlanet Gravity).
Other than being able to manage discussion groups with the Collabra 3.0 Server as well as compose and view HTML messages, Collabra Discussions doesn't have much to offer over its predecessors. In fact, it's debatable whether the inline newsreaders in earlier versions of Netscape were more user-intuitive and efficient at routine browsing of news groups; personally, I'd much rather have the newsreaders in Navigator 1.x or 3.x than the current Newsgroup client.
