Re: Outlook and news

On Sun, 2/22/2026 2:12 PM, Mark Lloyd wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Feb 2026 19:01:34 +0000, Peter Johnson wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
>> Outlook Express had news access. It wasn't that good, although I
>> couldn't tell you why at this distance. I used it for a few weeks before
>> I discovered Agent.
> 
> Some people had a problem when you're replying and it would start with the 
> cursor at the top, leading to top-posting. That one never bothered me, 
> since I knew to click before typing anything.
> 
> There was also a problem with multi-part binaries, although I don't 
> remember what.
> 
> I stopped using OE (and IE) around the time that Firefox was first called 
> Firefox (version .8).
> 

There were things like OEQuoteFix.

And OE wasn't the only USENET client that had a third party
write code to make the behavior a bit more "normal".

The stunningly helpful ones, have been binary patches to
things. The email client I used to use, one day it stopped
functioning, and it was because the ISP email server had
adopted a strange new address. I discovered someone had done
a binary patch for commercial software, causing the new email
server name to be parsed properly and accepted. And it had been
done, the binary edit, six years before I needed it. People can
do this, for software which is not signed. SuperPI (originally
written by some people in Japan), the source was lost, and
it's a benchmark, and more than one person contributed binary
changes to it to keep it going and prevent cheating.

And another example, is the "games collection" that they keep
moving forward into newer versions of Windows. You can continue
to play WinXP Solitaire, because someone knows which four bytes
in the executable that control "OS version exclusivity". These
games rest in a 100MB ZIP file.

   Paul