One of the first things I learned after starting this gig at LinuxWorld.com was that it's not at all unusual to hear from readers who are much better informed, and much more knowledgeable about Linux, than I am.

If I had harbored any secret desires to be taken for a Linux guru just because my name was on the masthead, they were quickly dispelled. Many of my best columns have come as a direct result of reader feedback. I don't always acknowledge that, but I should. This week there will be no pretense. Not counting vendors pitching their wares, I heard from readers about two applications that were new to me. One is a nifty email client called Sylpheed. Forum regular Raskinite mentioned Sylpheed in response to my recent column on Evolution, and I'm writing about it this week.

I learned about the second application from John Lederer, a chum from bygone days in a forum far away called Canopus. He wrote recently to let me know about a project he's involved with called Rolodap, which is an LDAP-based contact manager application. I'll write about that app in the near future. You can find the URLs for both projects in the Resources section.

Discovering Sylpheed

I found Sylpheed on Freshmeat, just as Raskinite had said I would. I chose to download it in the RPM format, and in less than five minutes from start to finish I had a new mail client ready to go. One of the features listed on the Sylpheed homepage is the ability to handle news as well as mail. Since that feature is currently on hold in Evolution, I decided to check it out right away.

One important caveat about Sylpheed -- the help manual is currently only available in Japanese. That gave me an excellent opportunity to test its user interface for intuitiveness and ease of use while trying to set it up as a newsreader. Having done so, I would give it high marks in both categories.

I flailed about for a minute or two, but then decided that I would need a new user account. That makes sense to me, since each individual email account requires a separate user. So from the Configuration menu, I selected Create New Account. Lo and behold, in addition to POP and IMAP server types, there was an option for News (NNTP protocol). That allowed me to define the news server and to specify the maximum number of new articles to download at a time.

I didn't find a way to browse the server and retrieve a list of available newsgroups, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. I did know the names of the newsgroups on the server, however, and

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