Type and license

GUI application for both Mac OS and Mac OS X.
Shareware, can be used in evaluation mode without limitations.

Languages

English and German localizations are included.
Third party localizations (i.e.: Italian) briefly follow every release, and can be installed on the existing application.

Platforms

Mac only – both Mac OS and Mac OS X.
Imports and exports both unix mailboxes and "rnews batch" archives.

Server access

Both anonymous and authenticaded server access are available.
Partial support for multiple servers: MacSOUP collects informations in "settings", and handles such settings once at the time; each setting can connect to a different news server.

Binary support

MacSOUP is strongly thread and discussions oriented, binary support is quite poor.

Filters

MacSOUP handles filters for both killfile and auto-highlight (tag), both per newsgroup and globally, based upon specific headers or every header, both simple and regex.
Filtering (just like searching) is amazingly fast.

Charset/Unicode

Charset and Unicode are correctly handled.

Thread/Answers

Automatically highlight answers.
Thread is displayed graphically, not through simple indenting but like a kind of "metro map".
User driven filter for kill/highlight and autokill/autohightlight are available, both simple and regex-based.

X-Face

X-Faces are supported.
In addition macSOUP supports an offline file of resources that the user can download and use: throught this file poster names are automatically associated to a color image.