Peter J Ross writes:

Windows has emacs, and therefore gnus.

Not to mention SLRN. But I can defend my list as a list of
user-friendly newsreaders with lots of twinkly icons and no lisp or
slang syntax to learn.

Aha, nothing like shifting goalposts is there ;-)

You made a good point, which I accepted. This isn't a flame war (yet),
is it? ;-)

Hope not :-)

So how are you going to keep pan off the list?

http://pan.rebelbase.com/

I think Pan is crap, personally. I've used two versions of it, and
they both made Sylpheed-Claws seem stable.

Well, pan's come a long way lately. I've got some version or other
installed here, just in case gnus fails me or for the very odd
occasion when I need a binary group.

But Windoze users won't install Cygwin.

They won't? I'm sure some of them will, otherwise it's pointless
people going to the effort of making it.

They'll install, at best, Agent or XNews. Cygwin and Gnus and Slrn
are *complicated*,

Not sure if slrn's that complicated. Last time I used it it worked
OOTB. If you mean that people would be put off by lack of a snazzy gui
interface, then you might be right. However they shouldn't be. Back
when I first encountered email properly in 1989 everyone I knew was
happy using VAXMail and some of those were Arts students ;-)

It's my belief that the GUI has de-skilled the population as a whole,
but that's another matter.

and I still insist that there's no intuitive Windoze newsreader for
the masses that's as good as KNode - or even Pan, if it's less buggy
than I found it to be.

But the point is that Pan is available for windows, without even
installing cygwin.

I think the point I'm trying to make here is that with open source
software platforms become less of an issue. Whether or not Knode has
been ported to Windows is less important than the fact that it could
easily be ported if someone wanted to. Therefore, although there are
many reasons for using linux, choice of a decent newsreader isn't
necessarily one of them :-)

--
Richard Watson
http://www.opencolo.com/
High Quality, Value for money colocation