"I want to kill...veins in my teeth." Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant."

I've created my first "Kill Files." I recently switched to MT-Newswatcher, a variation of Newswatcher, by John Norstad. It's basically the same interface, with a few additions and improvements. The MT stands for multi-threaded, meaning it can do more than one thing at a time. It fetches articles pretty fast, and, if you're downloading binary files, allows you to continue opening and reading articles.

I thought the original Newswatcher was all I'd ever need, but I ran into a problem. My local newsgroup was dominated by one cyber-paranoiac who would continually start flame wars. It's hard enough perusing articles without this insanity. Fortunately, in MT-Newswatcher, you can easily create a filter to block any particular author or subject. You can also highlight the same, in case you have favorite authors or a particular interest (it highlights your own postings by default!). You can do it for just that one group, related groups, or all groups.

Another improvement is that the Full Group list is shown as hierarchical folders, making it easier to scroll down the 8000+ list (fortunately, I already have all the Mac groups set up, and rarely consult the full list). There are other small changes. Rather than just a spinning cursor, you get a progress bar and a small text message at the bottom of your window telling you how things are going. For all of us who have watched that old radioactive ball spin and spin, it's nice to know that something is actually happening.

There is also an option to show the number of lines in messages, which is useful to avoid those extremely long, unlabeled ramblings, or worse yet, binary postings in regular groups. Support has been added for Apple Events spelling checkers, such as Spellswell.

For the technically inclined, there's excellent documentation of all the above features available online, including a good explanation of the arcane but useful "regular expressions" search language (for building custom filters). There are several pre-made filters available to kill spam postings.

A future version will include automatic marking of cross-posted articles, so you'd only have to see them once, and the option to use your regular e-mail application for e-mail replies.

This is an elegant program and a quality upgrade. The two main additions that I've noticed are filters and drag-and-drop. The filters can be used to sort your mail into separate mailboxes as it arrives. This is extremely useful if you subscribe to any mailing lists, so that the messages don't get piled in with your personal mail, but are automatically separated into their own mailboxes.

First you need to create the mailbox, then create the filter to send it there. It's a little tricky to choose the right header field, since on a list the letters may be shown as coming from different authors. Just use "Any Header" as the field and the list name as the criteria.

The address book is also improved. At first it seemed a little quirky, allowing you to give one person three different ways to be named. But now I find it very useful. I use one for "first name-last name" (no spaces allowed in nicknames), one for "last name, first name" (Name), and the last is for their e-mail address (filled in automatically from their letter).

There are several ways to set up your mailboxes and trash. Different types of mail can be stored as separate mailboxes. Eudora's trash (one step from the System's trash) can be configured to empty automatically on quitting, or only when you empty it manually (not recommended if you are lazy like me, or get a lot of mail-it can get huge).

I prefer to set up my own Saved Mail mailbox and transfer important personal letters there, using the trash for other disposables. You can also leave letters on the "In" list, but it soon becomes unmanageable. I chose the option to save my own outgoing letters, in case I should forget a detail (like whether I'd written something). There is an option to save letters in separate folders, but that uses far more disk space.

Here's my favorite tip for Eudora, which most of you already know. When you're going to reply to some text in a letter you've received, select the text, then hit Command-Shift-R. A new letter will be set up with the recipients address, a "Re:" subject header (same subject), and the selected text quoted in the body.

Another more obscure, but valuable tip: When someone writes a long letter to you, and you want to be able to read it as you write, not necessarily quoting them in your reply, but referring to their story, there is an easy to way to go back and forth. Hit the Command-\ (backslash-it's way up on the right under delete) keys to cycle between open windows. It's best to close others, such as In, etc., so there's only the two open.