Tutorial

Different ways to access to Newsgroups

As far as now we considered everything easy and obvious: everybody has an access to USENET and to any newsgroup. Very often this is not true and for several reasons. First of all few are today the servers that may take in charge the hundreds of messages sent daily to the tens of thousands newsgroups now existing. For that reason also he who has an access to a news-server can't be sure to be able to dispose even of the eight historical groups. Moreover some providers don't give access to a USENET. You must add to this that many persons accede to the Internet only from their studying or working place, which often don't supply the access to a news-server. So it's easy to understand why different methods to accede sprang and spreaded, other than by connecting to the news-server of one's provider.

In this section we explain synthetically these alternative methods, the likes you'll all find in Vagabondo's USENET page, where you'll find a list of the URL of the servers mentioned in this section

Google - groups

Google - groups has became rapidly a new very impportant service for USENET users also that cannot dispose of a news-server. we already spoke about it because it appears as the great achive of all the posted messages on a great number of the most important news of USENET. It's possible to leaf through the groups or make accurate researches (author, text of the message, date) comfortably through a web interface. Through this research it's possible to find many answers to our questions following past debates.

A typical screen view of Google - groups, the posts are composed as links of a web page, its possible to make researches by key-words inside all the groups.
The reason we speak of it here is that Google - groups consents to accede via web to a terrific number of newsgroups (practically to all the ones interesting for travellers), consenting to post one's messages and, if you wish, to shape one's access to the site as one would do with a newsrader. The only negative aspect is that all this must necessarily be done ON-LINE

Pubblic news servers

Even if they are more and more rare and difficult to find, some public news-servers exist, sometimes they contain a respectable lot of groups, and they are often employed for regional groups, to give to people not up to accede to USENET at least a free access to newsgroups in their language. The public servers are slower and frequently they close up, the Regional ones are more reliable but, of course, give access to a smaller number of groups.

Mail-to-news gateways

A "mail-to-news gateway" is a server which consents to send posts to newsgroups thanks to mails sent to the server, containing the proper information. They are (gates) to USENET via mail. This sort of service is by now quite rare, but still sufficiently in use for regional newsgroups. Usually the mail should have in the "to" field an address composed with the name of the group inserted in the place normally occupied by the addressee name (before "@") and the name of the mailgate as name of the server to whom to send mail (after "@"), but the method uses to change from server to server.

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