>> Outlook never supported NNTP

> If you know a bit more, you should know that Outlook Express does

I know that Outlook Express does and it's a distinct product from Outlook.

> The reason why I'm using Thunderbird as email client is probably because it got a (even through buggy but) functional NNTP support. I also know Thunderbird has a bug which prevents it from using the correct charset defined by the user, because I guess I've spent too much time on these news groups.

I haven't used Thunderbird to post to newsgroups recently, but I'm pretty sure that it set the charset part of the MIME header to utf8. When I used to post regularly, it was set to us-ascii based on what I set in Thunderbird's, Seamonkey's, Mozilla Mail & News, and Netscape Communicator.

> Also, reading your reply, I realized that you are putting a lots if not all of your own experience on "plain text messages", and you're thinking "this is fine"?

It works for this forum.

> Then wake up. On today's Internet, if your forum service cannot host memes and other types of rich multimedia, it's already out of public view.

Practically every comment on this website is essentially in plain text. Even most comments on reddit stick to plain text and neither website is out of public view.

> Dude, really? Just 750 Kb? :)

None of the comments you or I have written here come anywhere close to 750 Kb in size. Most emails I type aren't anywhere near that either. In fact, if you look at mailing lists like the ones used for the Linux Kernel and various subsystems and the one used by git project, you'll see that their inline patch messages come nowhere near that size limit. So you can easily read through any of those mailing lists using a NNTP gateway.

> It require some setup that most people don't know they can do

Like what exactly? The default configuration[1] shows message subject, author and date in bold text in the message list pane if you haven't read it and in regular text if you have.

> every time when new mails are downloaded, even if none of those mails are meant for you.

Usenet messages formed a multi-threaded discussion per topic. Messages that are posted as direct replies to message you posted are meant for you and can be easily spotted by scrolling through the list of messages in the message list pane and seeing direct replies to messages you posted in bold text. Even in threads that had thousands of messages, I could find replies to messages I posted in less than a minute. In contrast, I have to click through several screens of my comments on this website to see if any of them have replies and then remember if I had already read them or not.

> Your overall reply gives me a feeling that you're deep inside your own good-old-time memories

I still occasionally use usenet today and frequently use NNTP gateway services to browse mailing lists. It's not recollection of "good-old-time memories". Given your remark about being 13 years of age and donating lunch money makes me think that your recollection isn't very precise given your young age. I started using usenet in the mid '90s when I was an adult in my 20s. I used it daily posting and reading groups up till around 2015 or so when the groups I posted in basically were abandoned by all the regulars I used to interact with.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/i226q2c.png