Accessing public-inbox / lore via NNTP and Usenet reader (e.g., Usenet support in e-mail client)

Posted Jan 22, 2026 22:18 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Accessing public-inbox / lore via NNTP and Usenet reader (e.g., Usenet support in e-mail client) by jnareb
Parent article: Ryabitsev: Tracking kernel development with korgalore

I've been using NNTP with https://subspace.kernel.org/subscribing.html and gmane.org before that and it's great. Hey, the "compatibility" with SMTP is almost seamless even.

Except... it's hard to find a good client. Thunderbird works but it's heavy and slow, gnus requires learning Emacs and more...

SMTP and mailing lists were always the wrong tool for the job - massive missed opportunity. In terms of "market share", they are _both_ dying now.

Accessing public-inbox / lore via NNTP and Usenet reader (e.g., Usenet support in e-mail client)

Posted Jan 24, 2026 7:01 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

For news on gmane.io I use (gtk3-based) pan... which now has Dominique Domont, pan's Debian maintainer, as upstream pan maintainer as well, so support into the future is looking rather more solid than it did for most of the two-decades plus I've used it for news, as it went through several maintainers in that time.

Pan and its user community are proud of its continued 100% GNKSA approval so it should fit in well with the kernel community: no HTML, reply in quote context, configurable to wrap at 80 char or not (in keeping with GNKSA posts with long lines get a warning but you can continue), and it supports both plain text (no html!) and binary reading and posting. The biggest caveat with mailing list compatibility is don't send attachments as they'll be yenc encoded (efficient for news attachments but few mail-primary clients support it), but (with posting autowrap off) code can be pasted in as text and retain formatting. TLS connections are supported as is message signing (via gmime, tho the build defaults that to off). Posts/replies can be direct to news server, reply to sender (invokes your email client), or both (choose one and add the other in the reply-compose window). CCing a big list as is common on kernel lists is possible but manual (add in the reply-compose window).

For gentoo it's in the guru overlay for releases, or ask on the pan-user list if you want a copy of my live ebuild.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pan