Please click on the screenshot on the right to see it in the original size. There is another screenshot of the main screen showing some otherwise visually hidden features. Please note that the list of features below is far from being complete. We encourage you to download and see for yourself. For feature requests and bug reports please use the bug and feature request tracker Mantis.

 

Unicode support Dialog recognizes and decodes postings and emails using these character sets: us-ascii, utf-7, utf-8, iso-8859-1 to iso-8859-10, iso-8859-13 to iso-8859-16, koi8-r, koi8-ru, koi8-u, big5, big5-hkscs, gb2312, hz-gb-2312, gb18030, euc-cn, euc-jp, euc-kr, euc-tw, iso-2022-jp, jis-x0201, shift_jis, cp1250, cp1251, cp1252, cp1253, cp1254, cp1255, cp1256, cp1257, cp1258, cp850, cp862, cp866, cp874, cp932, cp949, cp950, cp1133, johab, x-mac-ukraine, x-mac-turkish, x-mac-thai, x-mac-romania, x-mac-roman, x-mac-iceland, x-mac-hebrew, x-mac-greek, x-mac-cyrillic, x-mac-croatian, x-mac-arabic, x-mac-ce

To be able to display characters from more exotic languages you will need to have a font installed that supports these characters. Dialog has a font fallback feature, so you can set your favorite font as the default font and Dialog will automatically use a better font if not all characters can be displayed.
When composing postings and emails you can enter all characters from the Unicode character range as long as you have a way to input them (IME). Dialog will automatically select the correct character set for your outgoing messages.
Searching, scoring and sorting in Dialog is done in Unicode, too, and you can use regular expressions.

Essential basic features
The following features should be mandatory for all newsreaders, but since they are not they are explicitly listed here:

• Correct encoding and decoding of inline encoded header fields
  
• Handling of and ability to post supersede and cancel messages
  
• What you see in the composition window is exactly how it is posted (no hidden formatting taking place)
  
• Correct handling of quoted lines when following up (e.g. quoted lines don't get wrapped when following up)
  
• Correct handling of subject lines that were changed ("(was: ...)")
  
• Correct handling of Followup-To and Mailcopies-To headers

Color coding
The message bodies in Dialog are color coded. You can use custom colors for quoted lines (with different colors for up to 4 quotation levels), signatures, links and spoilered text.

Extremely customizable GUI
Dialog has a modern look and supports Windows XP themes.
You can use a three pane layout for the list of newsgroups, the article list and message bodies with your preferred arrangement and you can zoom each of these panes.
The toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts are fully customizable.

Multiple server support
Dialog supports multiple servers. Though the same groups on different servers are presented as separate groups in Dialog, you can copy or move articles into one group, either manually or by using a filter that does it automatically. This is a great way to fill missing parts of multipart postings from other news servers. Dialog has support for SSL connections.

Multiple identity support
You can define multiple identities, e.g. when you have to post or email in your spare time and for your company.

Multiple background threads
Dialog can start multiple connections to each server and use these connections in multiple threads. A distinct thread logic makes the most of the number of allowed connections while leaving space for new tasks at the same time.

Spell checker
The built-in spell checker provides complete live-spelling and live-correct support, as known from MS Word. Dictionaries are available for more than 15 languages.

Email support
Dialog handles emails just as well as news articles. You can use the filtering support to automatically move emails from mailing lists to their own folder. The threaded sorting order for emails also makes it much easier to follow the discussion.

Scripting support
Change the way Dialog works or extend it yourself using powerful object oriented Pascal scripts.

Advanced scoring and filtering capabilities
Automatically fetch replies to your own postings or copy them to their own folder, hide or delete articles from known spammers, give a positive score on or color postings from your friends so you don't miss them, join articles from the same group but different servers into one group to fill missing multiparts. These are just a few things that you can do with scoring and filtering.
Note that you can score on all header fields in Dialog, since articles are not only scored when getting headers, but again when you get complete articles.

Support for binary postings
Dialog decodes and encodes attachments using Mime (Base64) encoding, UUEncoding and yEnc encoding. Dialog has internal viewers for video multimedia (using the codecs installed on your computer) and HTML.
The internal image viewer can show the following file types: *.png, *.jpg, *.tif, *.bmp, *.rle, *.dib,*.psd, *.pdd, *.psp, *.fax, *.bw, *.rgb, *.rgba, *.sgi, *.cel, *.pic, *.tga, *.vst, *.icb, *.vda; *.win, *.pcx, *.pcc, *.ppm, *.pgm, *.pbm, *.cut, *.pal, *.pal, *.rla, *.rpf

For multipart postings Dialog shows little icons that let you know if all needed parts are available on the server.

Custom sorting, filters and view
You can customize which articles you want to see in the article list and how they are presented. "Views" only show articles with defined flags set, e.g. only unread articles, only articles with bodies or only articles with the keep flag set. Additionally you can filter e.g. on the subject or from of articles.
Articles can be shown in the default threaded order or unthreaded and sorted by Date, Subject, From, MsgId, line count and score.

Import/Export of messages
Postings and emails can imported and exported from and to Unix mbox format text files

Crosspost management
Dialog keeps track of MsgIds and if it finds a message that you already know from another group it marks the message either read or deletes it

Support for tag lines (newsgroup descriptions)

Search not only for group names, but also on the descriptive text.

Spoiler character and ROT13 support

Spoilered text is initially hidden and you can apply ROT13 encoding to the text.

User glossary
Quickly insert predefined text into your postings

Addressbook
Manage and quickly locate email addresses

Bookmarks
Set bookmarks on articles to quickly relocate them later

Fully customizable keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures

X-Face support
Dialog shows X-Faces from other postings and you can quickly load your own and associate it with one of your identities

Signatures
You can set up multiple signatures for easy access from the composition window. Dialog has built-in support for random signatures.