Off-topic discussion about accessing Usenet newsgroups after changing Internet service providers, with technical advice about news readers and alternatives like DejaNews.
I am in the process of changing servers, and I was wondering if there is any way to access newsgroups like this from hotmail. I'm still learning the system, but I couldn't find any link like that. If not, I will soon be saying goodbye to all of these sites forever.
"Early to rise, early to bed makes a man healthy but socially dead." ---Yakko Warner
You might want to try http://www.dejanews.com for all archived newsgroups. That is where I go when I am on someone else's account and then I can still access this newsgroup. I think the posts may be a day or so delayed but they are there.
Single White Male wrote:
On Tue, 5 May 1998 16:58:34 -0500, the one known as Single White Male wrote thusly:
To which server are you switching? You can't be switching to Hotmail, since that's just an e-mail service, not an ISP. I believe that Netscape and MSIE both have built-in news servers. There are also servers that you can download.
In alt.tv.simpsons, on the "Re: Off the subject" thread, VoVat wrote:
Actually, they have built-in news *clients*, or news readers. A server is what you download the news from, and a client is what you use to read it.
The relationship works like this: Your ISP (which can be either a local ISP business, a national ISP like Netcom or AOL, a university, or a large business) runs a news server. Its job is to "listen" to the Internet 24 hours a day for news messages transmitted to it by other news sites. When a message arrives, the server saves it to an area on the server's hard drive called a "spool." When you run your client, it contacts the server and downloads just the messages you want to read. If you are running an interactive client, the messages are downloaded as you read them. If you are running an offline client, the messages are downloaded en masse to your computer, where you can read them at your leisure.
So, a news reader is to a news server what a Web browser(like IE) is to a Web server. Microsoft, incidentally, does maintain a news server, but it just carries the microsoft.public.* groups as a service to their customers.
Oh, and to answer the original question: If your ISP doesn't have news service for some bizarre reason, you can still read news. Just go to DejaNews (www.dejanews.com) or Reference.com (www.reference.com). Both carry <alt.tv.simpsons> so you can still get your daily fix.
[email] (VoVat) wrote:
<technical pedanticism> Netscape and MSIE *don't* have news servers. Netscape Communicator includes a Newsgroup reader (*client*), and people that are computer illiterate to be using MSIE can use Internet Mail and News (or whatever). The top money, of course, downloads Netscape Navigator only, and gets a separate news reader. One I highly reccomend is Free Agent, from www.forteinc.com. It is, of course, free. If you spend money, you can buy Agent, which is a spiffy mail reader, also.
Apart from all this, you still need access to an actual server. Most ISPs have one, but if you're really into newsfroups, you might even want to subscribe to special high-reliability news servers - I don't know much about those. </technical pedanticism>
If you need newsgroup access while you're still settling down at your ISP, try www.dejanews.com.
Tim Allen
If you're using IE 4.0 then you can use Outlook express to do news. You just have to get the name of the NNTP news server from your ISP (usually it's news.<ispname>.com(or .net))
Otherwise through the web interface you can use www.dejanews.com a lot of people use that.
Scott J. Friedman wrote:
Or you can just use this free NNTP server: www.valuu.net (not sure how good it is)
Solon