Other Applications
There are several applications that may be used with Xnews to good effect. On this page, you get links to some of them. All apps linked from this page are free as in beer (and as in Xnews), not necessarily free as in Stallman.
Xnews
Xnews Release Archive
This app works so well with Xnews that it is in fact Xnews. Ha! Or perhaps I should say they are Xnews. Whatever. Blinkynet's version archive has Xnews flavors going back several years. Of course, you can get the latest version from the Xnews page.
Other Applications, Really
Hamster Classic, a local server for news and mail
Hamster is a news and mail server you can run on your own machine. It'll download your news and/or mail automagically (with the use of the ClaraLoop script). Then you can use Xnews as an offline reader, connecting only to your local Hamster. There's much more Hamster can do for you. You should get it and you should use it and you should like it.
Mime-proxy, a program to convert character sets in news articles
Xnews doesn't deal well with character sets other than plain old US-ASCII. Patrick Lamaizière's Mime-proxy can help you handle them, for both incoming and outgoing posts.
Stunnel, the universal SSL wrapper
I'm not typing any more about this; I've already made a page about Stunnel.
Murray Peterson's Utilities
Murray Peterson has written several useful apps and scripts, including a bandwidth-limiting proxy and a proxy to show the communication between Xnews and the server. There's more, too. Click and scroll down to see for yourself.
XnewsQueue
Xnews doesn't natively support NZB files. If you'd like to use NZB files with Xnews, this utility is what you want. Update: Xnews does now support exporting NZB files. See the change log for more info.
The Regex Coach - interactive regular expressions
This one doesn't work with Xnews per se, but it is invaluable for learning the syntax used for scoring and filtering in Xnews. As the website says, The Regex Coach is a graphical application for Linux and Windows which can be used to experiment with (Perl-compatible) regular expressions interactively.
Guy's XP Icon Patcher Files
Xnews has a very Windows 9X-ish look. Guy has made it possible for you to give it a much more Windows XP-ish look just by executing his patcher. Make sure you get the patcher version that matches your Xnews version.
Windows Newsreaders under Linux HOWTO
Once upon a time there was a HOWTO document about running Xnews under GNU/Linux using the Wine API. Then some bits about non-Xnews readers were added and the title was changed. Still it's largely about Xnews, and still it's maintained ably by Daniel Quintiliani. It's available in pdf and other formats as well; if you want those, you can drill down from the LDP index page.
WinFace
With WinFace, you can make X-Face headers to use with Xnews or another newsreader. The documentation that comes in the WinFace zip archive explains how to use them with Xnews. There is also an Online X-Face Converter.
Snooze
Howe Park's program Snooze is designed as a personal assistant to help you find posts which interest you. It can search for you, generate Xnews filters, work with NZB files, and more.