Accessing the Usenet
The Messages of the Usenet can be read via News2mail. From my perspective this is of cause the way of choice.
However there are different ways to read messages:
Access News with a Newsreader
The 'classical' way to read News is a Newsreader. A Newsreader is a special program to read and post Usenet news. Most likely you have already a Newsreader installed on your PC, since Outlook-Express and the mail-client of Netscape Navigator and Mozilla also provide a function to read news.
I have compiled a list of Newsreader-programs.
Besides the Newsreader on your PC you will need to have access to a Newsserver. There are different kinds of Newsserver
Newsserver of your Internet-Provider
A lot of Internet-Providers provide a Newsserver for their customers. If your Internet-Provider has a Newsserver it is probably the best server you can find in terms of response-time. Search on the support-pages of your Internet-provider for the address of the newsserver. You will probably also find there some hints how to set up your reader
If you don't find the servername you may try with news.yourprovider.com since this is the usual name newsserver.
You have to find out if your Providers Newsserver has the group of your interest. If you are searching for Newsgroups containing binary data (such as songs, pictures or videos) chances are, that these groups are not available.
On commercial Newsservers you find all available groups.
Free Newsserver on the Internet
There is a number of free Newsserver out in the Internet. I have compiled a list of free Newwsservers and try to keep it up to date.
If you have installed your newsreader correctly it will open, when you use the link provided on the List of free servers or on the page for your group of interest on www.news2mail.com
The Problem with free-servers are:
- The servers tend to go away for some time or for ever without warning.
- The responstime is often bad
- A lot of free servers have limits such as the number of messages you can read per day.
- There are only few free servers, that allow posting
- Not all messages of the group appear on free servers.
- If you are searching for Newsgroups containing binary data (such as songs, pictures or videos) chances are, that these groups are not available on a free server.