I have defined a news account to Evolution and specified a USET News server. But I cannot see or selct any newsgroups to subscribe to. When I attempt a refresh after selecting a news server in Folder Subscriptions for the News account, I get an error message: “Error while performing operation” - which is a bit like an error message which says “This is an error message”.
No newsgroups are listed so it is not possible to make any subscriptions. Is this caused by a set-up error?.
Hi
Just tested here and added forums.opensuse.org, worked fine for me.
How did you setup the news account?
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Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SLED 10 SP2 i586 Kernel 2.6.16.60-0.25-default
up 10:05, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.09, 0.15
GPU GeForce Go 6600 TE/6200 TE Version: 173.14.09
Hi, thanks for confirming that Evolution works OK - but not the way I have set things up ;(
I followed your instructions:
Edit->Preferences->Mail Accounts->Add
added an account which I called Linux News; selected ‘USENET News’ as a server type and defined my ISP’s news server address for ‘server’ on the ‘Receiving Email’ tab. List of accounts shows ‘nntp’ as the protocol for this account.
I have confirmed with my ISP’s tech support that I am using the correct server name and I have the correct spellings too! (always important and rarely achieved in my experience)
I’m still getter the ‘you have an error and you have to guess what it is’ error message.
Hi
Can you try adding forums.opensuse.org as news server and see if that
works. If it does, it may be an authentication issue with your isp?
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Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SLED 10 SP2 i586 Kernel 2.6.16.60-0.25-default
up 0:33, 1 user, load average: 0.55, 0.19, 0.24
GPU GeForce Go 6600 TE/6200 TE Version: 173.14.09
Wise suggestion - that works just fine, once I get the correct user name for my opensuse forum login - otherwise I get an authentication error, but with a very clear error message, telling my I have an authentication error.
For my ISP news server, I don’t get a clear error message. I think I’m using an identical account configuration to that which currently works with Thunderbird on Windows. So I am a bit baffled as to which parameter or argument that I have set incorrectly.
Hi
Well I don’t use any authentication here for logging in to opensuse
forums, just set my email address.
Do you use a proxy, encryption? Did you try with the firewall off?
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Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SLED 10 SP2 i586 Kernel 2.6.16.60-0.25-default
up 1:20, 1 user, load average: 0.13, 0.16, 0.14
GPU GeForce Go 6600 TE/6200 TE Version: 173.14.09
OK, the problem is pretty much as you guessed, so many thanks for that. Cause: incorrect settings of various different renderings of the terms ‘name’, ‘account name’, ‘user name’, ‘user’ and so on. Once I stopped using names that people would use and used only ‘system’ type names (e.g “Tsortean.not@home.com” things worked OK - I was able to see the news groups of my ISP’s news server.
There is one usability issue though: there seems to be no way to ‘filter’ or select the newsgroup subscriptions when you have none currently selected: the total list of newsgroups (what, about 35,000 I guess ?) is presented. Paging through this lot is not practical. There is a selection mechanism within every other news client I have used.
Moreover, I’m not sure how the system is going to distinguish between subscriptions selections you have made and other newsgroups (up to the 35K limit) that you still could make.
The Evolution help file infers that this is the way you have to do it. It’s not usable, in practice.
Is this really the subject of another thread?
Hi
That’s why I find claws a good choice for me, lots of different
filtering capabilities processing rules, spell checking, spam
filtering, plugins, scripting etc.
I have no experience really in Evolution except as a mail client…
I prefer to compile from source, but claws is in the pacman repository
I think. Give it a whirl and see how it goes 
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Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SLED 10 SP2 i586 Kernel 2.6.16.60-0.25-default
up 6:27, 1 user, load average: 3.68, 3.21, 2.99
GPU GeForce Go 6600 TE/6200 TE Version: 173.14.09
I think I spoke too soon. It’s been my experience in everything Linux that what works ‘today’ will not necessarily work ‘tomorrow’, after a reboot.
Evolution news service is a case in point. I now find that there is no option I can set, anywhere, after some 10’s of attempts, which will get me past the 502 ‘authentication failed’ message when attempting to access the news groups and am being asked to supply an NNTP password.
In the meantime I have installed Claws Mail and tried it out on the newsgroups. I can make subscriptions OK, but I cannot see or save any jpgs from any of the binary newsgroups. All I see instead is the binary image data, not the image itself. I remember this used to be a common problem about 20 years ago but haven’t experienced it since, except with Claws Mail. I cannot seem to find the configuration parameter that will correct this. Where is it?