Chris Schreiner wrote:
> Louis LaBrunda wrote:
> 
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>>> Used this a long long time ago (free agent), maybe its time to ditch 
>>> Thunderbird
>>
>> Free Agent gives you the news reader, if that is all you need it is great
>> and the price is right.  For $29 you get the full version with the email
>> client (among other things), for me it is well worth it.  I think you can
>> try the full version for 30 days and then if you don't buy it reverts to
>> free agent.  
>>
> Yeah, and I just realised that I can download the whole she-bang of the 
> general mailinglist, all 52272 messages. Thanks for mentioning this!

Hello Chris,

Everything you've stated you wanted to do can be done in Thunderbird. I 
will grant you its offline newsreader isn't as nice as Free Agent.

Thunderbird has excellent searching and filtering facilities.

As far as downloading the entire set of messages. The way I like doing 
that in Thunderbird is to set up the gmane newsgroup, set its 
preferences to download messages for offline reading. Let it download 
the entire archive. I then close Thunderbird and copy the archive over 
from the News folder to the Mail folder and voila I have the full 
archive in my email and available to it searching capabilities.

I filter all my mail to its appropriate mailboxes. If you view the email 
source (ctrl-U, View->Message Source) you'll see all the headers 
available for filtering. For squeak-dev like mentioned earlier I use 
List-ID.

Try and use Agent if you wish, and if you like it better.
But don't give up on Thunderbird because it can't do what you want. From 
what I've read from you it can and more.

Hope this helps.

Jimmie