Starting Thoth for the First Time

When you start the program for the first time it creates a Thoth Preferences folder in the current Preferences folder. This is where Thoth will store its preferences and various settings that are used across multiple news servers. If you wish to have the program preferences stored elsewhere, after quitting the program you may move the folder to another location, and place an alias to the moved folder in the Preferences folder. The alias file must have the name Thoth Preferences.

Inside the Thoth Preferences folder is the Thoth Prefs file. This file contains all the settings that are edited in the program's Preferences dialog, plus your filters and newsgroup settings. The folder also contains the Thoth Servers folders which holds items for the Open Server command, the Thoth Stationery folder for personalities, and the Thoth Signatures folder for random signature support. The Thoth Servers and Thoth Stationery are automatically managed by Thoth. Placing text files in the Thoth Signatures will permit them to be used as random signatures. 

Thoth will create a set of default preferences when it first starts up. Before the program can be used you must perform some additional steps to fill in needed information about yourself and the news and mail servers you wish to use.

1) After starting the program for the first time, use the Preferences command. This displays the multi-pane Preferences dialog. It is particularly important to enter your name and email address in the Messages pane of the dialog, and to specify a mail server in the Mail Servers pane.

2) Close the Preferences dialog. Now choose New News Server from the File menu. You'll be walked through the process of creating all the settings for a new news server, connecting to the news server to fetch the list of newsgroups, and creating a list of subscribed newsgroups. Once you've done this use the Save command to save your group list. You can now begin to read news using Thoth.

3) To display the articles in a given newsgroup, double click the name of the newsgroup in the group list window you just created. Thoth will begin to get the headers for the articles, and will display them in a new article list window. In the article list window you can open individual posts by double-clicking them, or select a number of articles and save them to disk using the Save command. If a selected article has a binary attachment, the Extract Binaries command will download the article to disk and extract any binary attachments.

For more information on article list windows, including the various options you can set to determine how articles will be displayed and what headers will be shown, please see the User Guide.
