SNAP Usenet

  • Update 20th December 2022

 Download:  SNAP 1.2.3 450Kb

 Read the Manual:  SNAP Manual 1.4Mb

SNAP is a stand alone news client for Usenet servers such as Astraweb, and Giganews. SNAP requires Marinetti to be installed.

Usenet is so vast, that it is quite unrealistic for a news client on the IIgs to be able to fully handle the news groups, where many hundreds of Gigabytes can be posted daily, or to handle offline, the more than 100,000 separate news groups that might be available from commercial news servers.

To be able to work sensibly with this enormous amount of data, SNAP works as an online news client, and will only manually saves messages to disk as required. The drawback to this approach is that messages, and message headers, have to read their data on the fly directly from the news server. As a result, you will find that SNAP works best with an ‘always on’ connection, such as that provide by an Ethernet card connected to a broadband link. The advantage of the online approach is that you can access any group, or read any message. For practical reasons, messages larger than 256K will be truncated when displayed.

Given those limitations, you will find that SNAP works well with most commercial news servers. SNAP has been tested extensively with Giganews and Astraweb, two of the largest and most popular of the Usenet news severs.

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