Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
What is the newsreader equivalent of mutt?
Some would argue slrn. I personally would say tin.[1] Back in the Internet Pleistocene (1980s, 1990s), I used tin and really liked it, but its lack of maintenance (by late 1990s) started to become a problem, e.g., v. 1.2.x choked on long headers often encountered when someone crossposted to Basingstoke and back. Looking into the reasons for lack of maintenance I noticed it had (at the time) some sort of proprietary licence, so somewhat unhappily switcheched to slrn -- bit it never really grabbed me. Serendipitously, a few years later, I noticed that tin had been updated and changed over to BSD licenseing, and so switched back. [1] Truly old-school choice include rn, trn. However, I find tin's better threading, richer terminal support, and more-intuitive-to-me command set to make it win.