[sf-lug] Suspicious email from LinuxMafia

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> I have been reading Usenet newsgroups for a long time.

/me waves to a fellow devotee.

>  Well it text only groups satisfy your interest search on
> eternal-september.news.

My friend Marc Merlin likes to say 'What do you mean, text-only?  I view
it in an xterm!'  ;->

For those who don't get the gag about 'eternal September', Usenetters
observed a phenomenon starting in the 1980s when suddenly there was a
huge rise in misbehaving, boisterous people in newsgroups, observing
'Ah, clearly it's September again', i.e., when the freshmen at colleges
got Internet access and started wandering around everywhere ignoring
social norms, including all the Usenet discussion groups.

The gag was that it seemed like September came earlier and earlier every
year (as more of the general population discovered the Internet) -- and
that this phenomenon reached its apex in 1993, the year America Online
began offering Usenet access to its huge number of users.  The
epigrammic way of saying this is that the period starting in September
1993 (in-truth the month AOL opened Usenet access) commenced 'eternal
September' or 'the September that never ended':

   September that never ended

   All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the
   Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who,
   lacking any sense of netiquette [link], made a general nuisance of
   themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their
   first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what
   was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be
   assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became
   able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to
   acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before,
   this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on
   newsgroups. Syn. eternal September. See also AOL!.[link]

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html

> If you want binary posting as well I believe you will have to pay.

Because everyone needs alt.binaries.sheep.scared .  ;->

> I used Usenet news clilents on the Amiga and since then
> Thunderbird which is a bit top heavy but usable.

A good old-school choice is in the text-type categories is 'tin'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_(newsreader).