> The threading and only seeing new messages is a lot better in my Usenet client than any web forum that I use, including this one. Indeed! This is the other l

> The threading and only seeing new messages is a lot better in my Usenet client than any web forum that I use, including this one. Indeed! This is the other less-spoken flaw of walled-garden communication apps. Since they are proprietary, you're stuck with the very limited functionality the company has decided to implement (and it's always very limited). With open protocols such as SMTP and NNTP, there's no limit to how feature rich the clients (plural, since there can be many clients attuned to different tastes) can be. And you can always pipe things to a shell for an infinitely extensible set of capabilities. I find all the proprietary communication apps so frustrating, knowing that my email and usenet clients even back in the 80s had tons of more functionality and flexibility.