------------------------- Usenet_Access.txt ----------------------------

                     Usenet Access Guide 
                     ===================
Author: Uzi Paz (e-mail address: uzipaz@poboxes.com)
This version: 04 Nov 1997
First version was: 25 Apr 1996
----
Comments, both on content and on English, and more questions of a
general type, are welcomed by the author.
----
Q.1: What is the purpose of this document? What is the reason for
  writing this article?

A.1: Historically, it was developed from answers that I gave to
  questions appearing on CRUISE-L listserv list. There was a moment when
  I realized that I can gather all my answers together and keep a
  single file that I can send whenever someone asks about Usenet access.
  My "biggest mistake" was to make it in the Q & A format. In this
  format, it looked very poor and incomplete, so I had to add more Q's &
  A's, and finally it became a FAQ document.

  The purpose of this document is:
    1. To explain various ways to gain access to the Usenet, and the
       advantages each of them has.
    2. To unveil the mystery behind Usenet.

  If you need information of a more general nature related to Usenet, or
  you never saw a Usenet message in your life, you may look at the
  general references on A.32 .
----

Q.2: How to get a copy of this article?

A.2: An updated copy of this article can be found in the following
locations:
  ftp://ftp.crl.com/users/iv/iverham/ua.txt
  ftp://ftp.crl.com/users/iv/iverham/ua.zip (compressed)
  ("ftp://" types of URLs can be also accessed by anonymous ftp using
  ftp software).
  http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/1131/ua.txt
  http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/1131/ua.zip (compressed)
  http://members.aol.com/bombagirl/freeware/ua.txt
  
  If you want to be notified whenever a new version is published
  send a message to uzipaz.ar@poboxes.com typing "notify ua.txt"
  (without the quotes) in the subject prompt and leaving the body of the
  message empty. The notifications will be accompanied with a short
  description of the changes.
  If you want to know what is the newest version of this
  article and a short historical list of updates, send an equivalent
  message to uzipaz.ar@poboxes.com but with "get ua.upd" instead.
  If you want to cancel your "notify ua.txt" request, type
  "nonotify ua.txt" instead. If you have any problems with any of the
  above, you may send me a private message to uzipaz@poboxes.com .

  If you put a copy of this file on a site with public access (such as
  your homepage or an anonymous ftp site) please let me know so I would
  update the answer to this question, and send you updates regularly.
----

Q.3: What is Usenet?

A.3:  Usenet (Unix USErs' NETwork) [C.1] is a board for public network
  messages.  The messages are sent by people who have posting access to
  Usenet, and they are divided into different groups (called newsgroups)
  by some hierarchy, according to their subject, [C.2].
  The messages themselves are usually, loosely called `news'.
  For example: comp.mail.elm is a newsgroup which contains messages
  related to a mail program called Elm. It is part of the `comp'
  hierarchy. comp.binaries.ibm.pc is a newsgroup dedicated to
  transmission of binaries (programs) for IBM PC, and as you can guess,
  is part of the same `comp' hierarchy. comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d is
  dedicated for discussions on those binaries; rec.music.alternative is
  a newsgroup dedicated to messages related to alternative music, and
  as you already guessed is part of the `rec' (recreation) hierarchy.
  [C.3].  Each message looks quite like a regular e-mail message, (small
  differences in the header).

  Formally, the Usenet is a network, different from the Internet.
  It is called a logical network as it has a structure but physically
  its data is propagated from one location to another via various
  different physical networks, such as the Internet, BBSs and others.
  Practically, the Internet adopted Usenet, and browsing Usenet news is
  made within the Internet via Internet protocols, (see A.13 and A.14).
  Still, one may have access to Usenet without having access to the
  Internet.

  The Usenet does not belong to anyone.

  For more general information on Usenet, see A.32.


Comments on A.3:
C.1: A comment about the name `Usenet': In the beginning, Unix users
     organized as a group and called themselves Usenix,
     (http://www.usenix.org). They publicized their network and called
     it Usenet. Hence, I believe that Usenet just comes for "USEnix
     NET".
C.2: You may find information on the more popular hierarchies on:
     ftp://ftp.users.ncfcomm.com/Wizardchives/newsgrps.txt
     http://www.users.ncfcomm.com/Wizardchives/newsgrps.txt
C.3: I would recommend you to spend some time browsing the list of
     newsgroups' names with descriptions, in order to have a feeling on
     what exists on Usenet, and the standards of newsgroups' naming.
     In order to know how to do it, you may see A.5.
----

Q.4: What is NetNews?

A.4: Netnews (Network News) is a less common, older synonym for Usenet.
----

Q.5: How many newsgroups exist? Where are they listed?

A.5: Nobody knows exactly, and the number is changed daily. (In fact
  it grows exponentially).  There are many newsgroups which are local to
  specific institutes, networks, or areas and do not propagate outside.
  over 400 hierarchies exist on Usenet ! Most of them are local [C.1].
  It was estimated [C.2] that Usenet doubles itself every year and a
  half.

  In order to clarify the situation:
  the newsgroups are divided into two categories:

  1) "official" newsgroups, usually referred as belonging to "the big
  eight" hierarchies: comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, talk.
  Originally Usenet was planned to include only this category. In order
  to open a new group, one has to make some procedure, which
  includes a discussion on Usenet and a voting procedure.
  The number of newsgroups in this category is well known, and on
  Aug 9, 1996 there were 1988 newsgroups in this category. Every two
  months or so, the moderator of news.announce.newgroup sends an updated
  list of these newsgroups to news.answers, news.groups,
  news.announce.newgroups, and news.lists.misc [C.3] newsgroups. At the
  moment the list is sent in three parts, and they can be received from
  RTFM server, either via e-mail by sending a message to
  mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with only a single line as the body of your
  message:
  send usenet/news.answers/active-newsgroups/*

  or via anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu at directory:
  pub/usenet/news.answers/active-newsgroups/
  files: part1, part2, part3 .

  2) alternative, local, and regional hierarchies. As Usenet is a world
  without police, it was only a matter of time until people ignored
  the rules for placing a new newsgroup, and will put their new
  newsgroups on Usenet, skipping the discussion period, and voting. This
  was the origin of the alt hierarchy, the biggest and most anarchic
  hierarchy on Usenet. Many institutes/organizations put new newsgroups
  in order to serve some local/regional needs, some of those hierarchies
  have rules for opening new newsgroups, in some of those hierarchies,
  there is a "dictature" of some institution which decides which
  newsgroup to accept, while in others, in order to open a new newsgroup
  one has to make a procedure equivalent to the one of the "eight big
  hierarchies".

  Nobody knows how many such newsgroups exist. Some sites hold more than
  30,000 newsgroups. Some of them are very popular, most of them are
  not.

  You may find a very comprehensive list of newsgroups (from both
  categories on Tile.

  You may visit Tile in http://www.tile.net/news/ . It is a very good
  place to learn what newsgroups exist, what is the purpose of each
  newsgroup, and other statistics about each newsgroup.
  Another option is the Liszt service, which will find for you a proper
  newsgroup according to keywords that you provide it. In order to use
  Liszt either enter http://www.liszt.com or send an empty message to
  liszter@bluemarble.net for receiving a help file on the usage of Liszt
  via e-mail.

  Another very nice list is the CyberFiber list on:
  http://www.cyberfiber.com/news/

  A single file which lists all newsgroups which are supported by UUNET
  can be found on:
  ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/config/newsgroups.gz

  There are too many other lists to be mentioned here.
  A list of other places where newsgroups are listed can be found on:
  http://www.jazzie.com/ii/internet/newsgroups.html


Comments on A.5:
C.1: An impressive list of newsgroups' hierarchies is the "Master List"
     by L.S. Eisen. You may find it either by ftp:
     ftp://ftp.magmacom.com/pub/misc/Master_list.txt or on WWW:
     http://home.magmacom.com/~leisen/master_list.html , or via e-mail:
     by sending a message to leisen@pfx.on.ca with SUBJECT:
     "Send Master" (without the quotes).
C.2: Source is from "Mining for Gold on the Usenet highway (1996)" course
     by Spectrum Universal (http://www.vu.org)
C.3: The news.lists newsgroup was renamed to news.lists.misc on 04/12/96 .
     It is expected that there will be a transition period, where some of the
     news-servers will still hold news.lists, some will hold news.lists.misc,
     and some will hold both.
----

Q.6: How many messages per day are posted to a typical newsgroup?

A.6: There is no such a thing as `typical newsgroup'. Some newsgroups
  are practically dead and rarely receive messages. Other may have from
  few messages per day, to hundreds (!) of new messages each day.
  As in the former question, you may find statistics on every newsgroup
  in http://www.tile.net/news/ .
----

Q.7: What do I need in order to have access to Usenet?

A.7: In order to gain access to Usenet you need three things:

  1) A source of Usenet news, i.e. a computer that holds the news (i.e.
  the data) and on which you have permission to read/browse/receive news
  from it. Such a computer is called "news-server" (even if the computer
  has other purposes as well).

  2) A news program, (i.e. a program which you can use in order to
  read news).  Such a program is usually called a `news-reader', and
  also sometimes `news-browser'. Some news-servers allow you to gain
  access to Usenet via "ordinary programs" such as e-mail programs.
  (In the more technical jargon "Some news-servers allows you to gain
  access to Usenet via protocols different than NNTP, such as SMTP etc.)
  If you did not understand the technical jargon, return to it after
  A.13.
  Some tools (such as Web-browsers, or the `pine' e-mail program) allow
  you to browse also news.

  3) A connection between the news-server and your computer.
  This may be an Internet connection (i.e. TCP/IP connection), but
  other connections or networks can do as well. On the Internet, the
  connection usually is the same as the regular telnet connection, (in
  fact, you can use telnet in order to receive the news).

  On other networks, you may still have access to Usenet, but the level
  and the type of connection is highly dependent on your specific
  connections, ////comments are welcomed here////.
----

Q.8: Does everybody who has access to Usenet need to know the answer
  to question 7?

A.8: No. The answer to Q.7 and more information on the news-server and
  news-reader, is relevant only to people who want to install the
  news-reader, or are unhappy with the news access they get from their
  Internet access provider, and want to use news-servers, different from
  the default of the provider.


Comments on A.8:
* There will usually be one advantage of your Internet Service
  Provider's default news-server upon others. It is usually much faster.
----

Q.9: I have an access to Usenet but I found that there are groups that
  I don't have access to.

A.9: None of the news-servers is subscribed to all newsgroups, i.e.
  each of them holds only part of the newsgroups. One of the differences
  between different news-servers, is the list of the newsgroups they
  hold. Later on, we'll see more differences between different
  news-servers (in fact when we said in A.8 "unhappy with the news
  access" we meant to these differences).
----

Q.10: How long are messages kept on the news-server? (i.e. until I
  cannot read them with my news-reader). Can I retrieve them after
  that period? I found that some news-articles reside much longer than
  usual.

A.10: This is another property in which news-servers differ. One
  news-server will hold messages sent to some newsgroup for two weeks;
  another one will hold them only for two days. About one giga-bytes
  (=1024 mega-bytes) of new data is added to Usenet every day! (one can
  use the Usenet Storage Space Calculator at
  http://www.netpart.com/free/usenet.html in order to receive more
  statistics about Usenet storage). It is almost impossible to hold
  messages of many newsgroups for long periods.  The amount of time that
  a news-server will hold a message until it will be deleted can be
  different for different newsgroups.  The news administrator (the
  person who is in charge for the news-server) can set different times
  for different newsgroups. After that, they are deleted.
  There is a special field in the header (i.e. a special line in the
  first few lines of the news articles; among the "Subject:", "Date:",
  and other fields), which allows the sender to request a different
  expiration date for that news article. It is called "Expires:" and
  is useful for important messages, such as FAQ files, or messages from
  the moderator, to stay longer on the newsgroup. A news administrator
  may set the news-server to bypass these expiration dates if longer
  than the preset expiration date for news on that newsgroup. The
  moderator may also reset expiration dates for his newsgroup.

  There is no general archive for all newsgroups, but some of the
  newsgroups, and some of the news messages are archived (we elaborate
  on this point in A.26).
  If you missed a post by few days you may try to connect to a different
  news-server. You may also send to the newsgroup a request to repost
  the message to you (for example, to your personal e-mail), but the
  best thing is to use DejaNews (see A.29)
----

Q.11: I'm subscribed to some newsgroup. There are messages,
  which were sent to this newsgroup that I don't receive.

A.11: In order to fully understand this answer, return to it after
  reading A.13, and A.14
  
  There are many reasons for this. For example, if a message has in its
  header, a field "Distribution:" and it is not set to: "world", then
  the distribution of the message is restricted by its author. The
  Distribution field tells the servers to forward the message only to
  servers which are part of the distribution. The whole set of valid
  values for the distribution field, is not well standartized.
  
  Another option is that the newsgroup is moderated and the message was
  sent, but not (/yet) released by the moderator.
  In fact, if the author crossposted the message to several newsroups,
  (see A.16 for the notion of "crossposting"), and some of them are
  moderated, the messages may not appear in any of the newsroups until
  the moderator who received the message will release it for
  publication (in order to understand the above, you should read A.14)
  
  It is not, however, rare that your news-server will not receive news,
  which had to be there:
  unlike ordinary e-mail which has a specific destination, and there is
  some mechanism that checks that it will reach its destination one way
  or the other, for news messages, there is no trace whether they
  reached your local news-server or not, and it is the responsibility
  of your news-server to load all news.

  It is enough that the message will not be routed in one of the links
  to your server in order for you not to receive it.

  Many reasons may cause this: First, a slow connection. If it takes
  more than 500ms for your news-server to respond to a call by the
  master news server (See A.14) then 24 hours per day would not be
  sufficient for receiving the (say) 150,000 new messages arriving each
  day to the master server, [C.1]. Access to hard-disk may slow this
  access to more than 500ms per news article. Many servers are set to
  keep news so as to use as much of their storage as they can. If
  however, the storage limits are reached, they won't be able to receive
  new messages beyond that limit, and messages will be lost. These are
  just examples.  As I said before, there is a chance that your
  connections are fine, but the news-server that feeds you, does not
  receive all news. A solution to this is to be fed by more than a
  single master server.


Comments on A.11:
C.1: If you noticed that 500ms times 150,000 is less than 24 hours, it's
     not a mistake: for any news article there are two calls: one
     for the header of the article and another for the body.
----

Q.12: I received a reply to some message, but only few days later I
  received the original message being replied.

A.12: Different messages travel in different paths to different
  news-servers. If you receive the reply of Mr. B to a message of Mr. A
  before you receive the message of Mr. A, it means that it took less
  time for message A to go to Mr. B's news-server and then for Mr. B's
  message to go to your news-server, than it took  for Mr. A's message
  to go to your news-server. Sometimes it takes few days and even weeks
  for a message to find its way to your news-server. It may happen 
  (although rarely) that you'll receive the original message only
  after the reply to it was deleted.
----

Q.13: How does the news-reader communicate with the news-server?

A.13: There are two cases; if the news-server is the same computer as
  the one that you use, then a direct reading of news is in order.
  Usually, the news-server would be another computer.
  within the internet the communication is held via the same connections
  used for telnet.
  The language which is used is called NNTP (Network News Transfer
  Protocol). NNTP has commands like `LIST', `GROUP', `HEAD', `NEXT',
  `QUIT', etc. The news-reader knows it is talking in NNTP language
  because it initiates the talk. In order to let the news-server know
  that it should interpret the input as NNTP commands, there is a
  special port on the computer which serves as the news-server.
  Everything that is sent to that port is interpreted as NNTP commands.
  The standard port for NNTP is port 119 (Many computers serve both as
  news-servers, mail-servers, ftp-servers, WWW-servers etc., for each
  such an application there is a port for incoming requests, e.g. the
  port for HTTP is 80, for GOPHER it is 70, for FTP 21, for SMTP
  (= e-mail) it is 25 etc.).
  You may now begin to communicate with your news-server manually: say
  if you know that news.bgu.ac.il is a news-server that permit browsing
  from your machine, you may just type:
  `telnet news.bgu.ac.il 119'
  as a result the computer will enter a listening mode.
  If you'll type `LIST' the server will respond in listing all the
  active newsgroups it supports. You may use all other commands, and in
  the end type `QUIT' to quit.
  The news-reader does the same thing automatically.  Of course not
  every one is allowed to "talk NNTP" with any news-server. Every server
  has a list of other news-servers permitted for communication, and
  `clients' (sites where simple users are permitted to browse).

Comments on A.13:
*  Recently, there are efforts to make the Internet more secure.
   There is an extension to the internet protocol called SSL (Secure
   Sockets Layer). At the moment SSL is not yet a standard, although
   Netscape have aleady adopted it. The extension of NNTP for use over
   SSL is called SNEWS (Secure News) (although the name SNNTP is also
   mentioned from time to time). The port for SNEWS (or SNNTP) is
   563 (instead of 119). The snews protocol should not be confused
   with the snews (Simple News) news-reader program.
----

Q.14: How do the news articles travel ?

A.14: Within the Internet, the news are traveling from one news-server
  to another via the same NNT-Protocol. Each news-server initiates
  connection periodically with another news-server(s) (one or more) and
  receive/post updates from the remote news-server. The computer which
  initiates the connection is called slave-news-server, the other one is
  called master, (master news-server). There is a way (i.e. NNTP
  command) to tell the news-server which news are already on the slave
  server so the master wouldn't send them again. The update period is
  set by the slave server. Remember that news-servers do not keep news
  for long periods, so that if the period would be too long, the master
  news-server will delete some of the news before the slave server
  received them.  Usually, the update period is faster.
  When a news-server receives a message, it delivers it to all its
  neighbours.  Special attention is made so no loops will be generated.
  If you send a message to a moderated newsgroup, the news program will
  post the message to the moderator of the newsgroup, instead of
  delivering it to its neighbours. Only after the approval of the
  moderator, it will start to propagate to the news-servers.
  For more information related to moderated newsgroups, see:
  ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/news/moderated-ng-faq
  The proper way to send a message to more than one newsgroup, is by
  crossposting. Crossposting and the way news-servers deal with it, are
  described in A.16 .

  A comment should be added here: NNTP is the standard for Internet, but
  older methods such as UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) are still around.
  Unlike NNTP which is an Internet protocol, UUCP is a batch command,
  originally, a Unix command (in fact a part of a package of commands),
  which allows you to copy files and directories from one machine to
  another using their serial ports either directly or via modems.  It is
  mainly used off the internet, though.
  There is a universal network originally called UUCPNET, and
  now called UUNET which uses UUCP by a store and forward mechanism
  along its connections to deliver news-messages.  Today this network is
  connected to the Internet. Historically, UUNET was the first
  commercial network on which Usenet news traveled, in their early days.
  (see http://www.uu.net/about.htm for more info).

Comments on A.14:
*    You'll find in some of the literature that the "CP" of UUCP comes
     for "CoPy", other literature says "Copy Program", and other
     literature says: "Copy Protocol". Although the last option sounds
     very "logical" I chose to believe the first one, as it has the
     standards of commands' naming on Unix.
*    Advantages and disadvantages of UUCP over NNTP:
     NNTP ask for list of already existing articles on the slave
     news-server, and only the new ones are sent. UUCP just copy the
     whole database from the master news-server to the slave news-
     server. It seems that using NNTP is much faster than using UUCP,
     but in many cases UUCP is much faster: The complex conversation
     that the two servers do for each news article when using NNTP,
     doesn't lead to efficiency, while the huge files submitted using
     UUCP are simpler, and allow a very efficient compression, (in many
     cases).
----

Q.15: I want to enter deeper into the NNTP protocol and to the logical
  structure of Usenet, (i.e. message delivery in Usenet).

A.15: The place for the more technical information about Usenet
  structure and NNTP is the relevant RFC's (RFC = Request For Comments).
  The RFC files are the standard tools for system maintainers.
  NNTP is described in RFC977. The Usenet structure and the meaning of
  each of the fields in the header of a news article, is described in
  RFC1036.  You may find those files either in ftp://funet.fi/rfc in a
  compressed format, or in either a gzipped format or in a plain format
  from
http://www.leo.org/cgi-bin/leo-dls/pub/comp/doc/standards/rfc/00-index.html .
  You may also retrieve those files from:
  http://www.duke.edu/~mg/usenet/standards.html .
  An old draft version of the RFC which was meant replace RFC1036 can
  be found in a compressed format on
  ftp://ftp.zoo.toronto.edu/pub/news.txt.Z (in the same directory
  you'll find also a version in a PostScript format). An html version
  of this file can be found on:
  http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/netnews/son-of-1036.html

  In the lack of update to the old rfc1036, the son-of-rfc1036 is
  considered by many, as a valid companion to rfc1036.

  There are many works done at the moment on the Usenet standards:

  The IETF group for working on NNTP extensions is NNTPEXT,
  See http://www.academ.com/academ/nntp/extensions .

  Recently a new group: USEFOR (http://www.landfield.com/usefor/)
  applied to IETF in order to work out a document which will replace the
  old rfc1036.

  Another IETF group (IETF-NNTP) works on replacing rfc977 (see:
  http://www.academ.com/academ/nntp/ietf.html  and
  http://segate.sunet.se/htbin/wa?S2=mailnews-l&q=IETF-NNTP )

  Another group (MailNews-L) is working on harmonizing E-Mail and
  Usenet:    http://segate.sunet.se/archives/mailnews-l.html 
----

Q.16: How can I send a single message to few newsgroups? I replied to a
  message in rec.humor with a silly joke of my own, and got complains
  from readers of comp.periphs that my message was improper in their
  newsgroup.

A.16 The header of a message to usenet contains a header-field called:
  `Newsgroups:'. For example when you send a message to comp.periphs
  your news-message will have the header-field:
  `Newsgroups: comp.periphs'.

  Sometimes there is more than one newsgroup which is proper for your
  message.  For example, if you want to make a joke on some new
  peripherials to be added to the computer in the 21th century, you may
  wish to send it both to comp.periphs, and to rec.humor . The proper
  way to do it, is not by sending a copy to each of the newsgroups, but
  rather to `crosspost' it to both newsgroups. This is to be done by
  changing the `Newsgroups:' header to:
  `Newsgroups: comp.periphs,rec.humor'. In this way a SINGLE COPY of
  your message is submitted, but it will be indexed in both newsgroups,
  so readers of any of these newsgroups will see your message as if it
  was sent to that newsgroup. Furthermore, if one has read your message
  on one of these newsgroups and marked the message as `read', it will
  be marked as read in both newsgroups saving him from reading the
  message again, when accessing the other newsgroup.

  There is however one point to be aware of. If someone will read your
  joke on rec.humor he might reply with a joke of his own, on `dogs in
  the 21th ct.'.  Why not? It is a proper topic for rec.humor. But the
  poor guy didn't noticed that his reply will also be crossposted to
  comp.periphs, and flames are already on their way. You could save this
  guy the trouble, by setting another header-field:
  `Followup-To: rec.humor' which will automaticaly set `Newsgroups:'
  header of the replies, to rec.humor, even for people who replied to
  your message at comp.periphs .

  More on this topic, and other topics related to filtering of
  news-messages, can be found in:
  http://www.mcp.com/sams/books/30599-2/tig09.htm

  The fact that when crossposting, only a single copy is distributed,
  has a special meaning when you submit your message to newsgroups, and
  one of them is moderated. In such a case, the message will be sent by
  e-mail to the moderator, and will not appear in any of the newsgroups
  until the moderator will release it. The moderator can release it
  only for the newsgroups which are not moderated by him/her, and
  hopefully, the moderators are esponssible enough, not to moderate
  other newsgroups. An even more problematic case, is when one
  crosspost a message to more than one moderated newsgroups. In such a
  case, the message will be sent to only one moderator, and the
  moderator should also deliver it to the moderators of other moderated
  newsgroups.
----

Q.17: Where can I find a news-server which I will be permitted to
  access?

A.17: James W. Abendschan is maintaining an updated list of news-servers
  that give free access permission [C.1]. The service is called NewzBot
  and you may find it on:
  http://www.jammed.com/~newzbot/
  This service allows you also to search for NNTP servers which carry
  a specific newsgroup. It also provides a PERL source for the program
  that is used for producing the list. The service also provides an
  option to post messages to newsgroups.

  A program equivalent to the one that Abendschan runs, is called
  NewsHunt, [c.2]. It's free and can be found on
  http://www.slip.net/~rain/nh/
  It runs under Windows-95 (or above) or under NT-Windows with Winsock.

  Another one who provides a service equivalent to Abendschan's is
  Michael Voigt. You may either browse the list of open NNTP servers
  by yourself (http://www.lipsia.de/~michael/lists/pubservers.html),
  or use his search engine to find one that is subscribed to some
  newsgroup of your interest
  (http://www.lipsia.de/~michael/NNTP/group.html)

  You may also try one of those:

  * http://www.reed.edu/~greaber/servers.html

  * http://www.ravenet.com/users/suz/news/news.htm

  * http://www.krusty.net/usenet.html

  * http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/3959/nntp0.html

  You may find other sites on:
  http://www.yahoo.com/News/Usenet/Public_Access_Usenet_Sites
  and on: 
  http://www.win.bright.net/%7Eddanders/usenet.html , which also provides other
  info related to Usenet access (such as a list of commercial Usenet service
  providers).

Comments on A.17:
C.1: I highly recommend you first read the notes and FAQ on Abendschan's
     list of news-servers, before using the list.
C.2: Run it at your own risk. I didn't check it, and I don't know
     anything about its source.
*    Public NNTP/Usenet servers tend to be closed shortly after they are
     discovered by many people, Don't trust an old list of Open NNTP
     Servers.
----

Q.18: Can I use a Web-browser as a news-reader?

A.18: Usually, the answer is YES.
  You are already familiar with URLs of the type:
  1) http://site.address/file.name
  or with
  2) ftp://site.address/file.name .
  There are two more types of URL's [C.1]:
  3) news:news.group
  and
  4) nntp://news.server/news.group .
  (Notice the two backslashes are missing in URLs of type 3).
  First we should discuss URL's of type 3. Notice that there is no
  reference to a news-server. URL of type 3 will browse news only from
  the default news-server [C.2]. So how do you define the default news-server?
  There are three possibilities:
  The first one is to set the default news-server by setting a proper
  variable before running the news-reader/Web-browser. For example if
  you are on Unix machine and want to access the newsgroup
  rec.audio.high-end using the news server: news.huji.edu (Just for
  example; you should of-course use a news-server with right access
  permissions) then, you may set the environment variable NNTPSERVER by
  typing (without the quotes): `setenv NNTPSERVER news.huji.edu'
  and then enter your Web-browser and jump to URL:
  news:rec.audio.high-end .
  You may also type: news:* in order to receive a list of newsgroups
  supported by this news-server with links to the newsgroups.
  In some Unix machines which work in older shells such as ksh,
  bash, zsh, etc. `setenv NNTPSERVER news.huji.edu' won't work and you
  should replace it with `NNTPSERVER=news.huji.edu; export NNTPSERVER'.
  On IBM-PC you may set this environment variable by adding the
  following line:
  SET NNTPSERVER=news.huji.edu
  to your config.sys file.
  I do not know what are the equivalents to this method for other
  machines (such as Mac).   ////comments are welcomed here////
  Usually this option will work, but not always (depends on the specific
  parameters given either at the configuration file (which defines the
  defaults), or at the system configuration at the time of compilation.
  So we come to the second option: changing the default parameters in
  the setup file; most of the Web-browsers have a file which holds many
  setup and preference parameters. For example lynx, the best text-only
  Web-browser, has a setup file called .lynxrc which has a parameter
  for default news-server. Set this parameter and everything will work.
  In many Web-browsers (e.g. Netscape) you may change this
  setup from the browser by clicking on the `options', `setup' or
  `configuration' menu.
  But not always. Sometimes, your Internet system provider sets the
  default news-server before compiling the Web-browser. If this is the
  case then you cannot use type 3 URL in order to browse from a
  different news-server.
  NNTP type URL allows you to browse directly from a different
  news-server. For the above example you may type:
  nntp://news.huji.edu/rec.audio.high-end
  and you'll receive the list of news of this newsgroup held in this
  news-server (with links). You may also just type:
  nntp://news.huji.edu to receive the list of newsgroups supported by
  this news-server, with a link to each of them.
  In some systems, the system programmer configured the Web-browser so
  that it won't respect the NNTP:// type of URL.


Comments on A.18:
C.1  The URL of the Secure news (see comment to A.13) as adopted by
     Netscape is snews://news-server/newsgroup . It is not mentioned
     here, since it is not accepted as a standard yet.
C.2  In fact more and more browsers support the structure:
     news://news-server/newsgroup , which has a meaning identical to 
     nntp://news-server/newsgroup , but formally it is non-standard. 
*    tin is very useful if you're not using a slow news-server. When
     initialized, tin loads up lot's of data, of which most of it may
     not be necessary for you. On a slow connection it may take a lot of
     time.  I don't know about rn and nn in this respect. Web-browsers,
     would do much better on slow news-servers.
----

Q.19: Where can I find a nice news-reader for my computer?

A.19: There are lot's of news-readers free (either public-domain or
  freeware) retrievable via anonymous ftp. If you know which news-reader
  you prefer, then you can use Archie in order to find a location where
  you can download it. If not, you may ask for help in the relevant
  newsgroup such as news.software.readers .
  another option is to use the services of shareware.com by entering
  http://www.shareware.com/code/engine/SearchOption
  putting news as a first word and reader as a second word with `and'
  option and choosing a category from MS-Windows(all), Macintosh, DOS,
  OS2, UNIX, etc.
  As for Unix, I use a program which is called tin, and I highly
  recommend it. Other popular programs are trn and nn. A very popular
  news-reader for PCs is the FreeAgent (/Agent), which is mentioned in
  the next paragraph.
  Well, at the moment you may use e-mail in order to advice
  news.software.readers group or Archie facility (See A.23).  When
  sending a question to a newsgroup via e-mail you may ask to reply to
  your personal e-mail address.


Comments on A.19:
*    If you don't know what Archie is, you may look either at the
     Encyclopedic dictionary mentioned in A.31 or better, to read the
     Roadmap lectures mentioned in A.32.
----

Q.20: How do I tell my news reader the address of the news-server?

A.20: First you may try setting a proper variable.  For Unix you should
  set the environment variable NNTPSERVER exactly as explained in A.18.
  You may also look at the defaults setup file for your news-reader
  (.tinrc for `tin' newsreader) or in the help files of the news reader.
  If none of the methods work, you should consult the
  news.software.readers newsgroup, (you may look at A.23 in order to see
  how to do it by e-mail).
----

Q.21: Are there offline newsreaders, so I can reduce the connection
  time to my Internet provider?

A.21: Yes. Let me introduce this point. This file is around 60Kb.
  How much time it will take you to finish reading it? And how much time
  it will take you to read a 1Mb of text? You would never finish it.
  If you want to read the 60 messages arrived yesterday to, say,
  two newsgroups of your interest, and also presumably want to reply to
  few of them, it will take you maybe an hour maybe more. In many
  cases you don't want to be online all that time as you might pay for
  it, not talking of keeping the telephone line busy all that time.
  You would prefer to just download this 300Kb of text (120Kb when
  compressed) and then disconnect, read it on your free time, type down
  the replies on your free time and then connect again (or wait until
  you connect again) and upload the replies. You may do everything
  manually, which will take you time, and would be uneasy, but in order
  to make this procedure easier, you may use an offline news-reader.
  Popular offline newsreaders, such as FreeAgent (for MS-Windows) or
  YARN or SOUPER and MacSoup (for Mac), use a protocol called SOUP
  (Simple Offline Usenet Packets). Older standard which was used in
  BBS's but have compatibility problems with the standard structure of
  Usenet messages on the Internet, is QWK . Other less common standards
  are the QWK with "header in body" format, which is a modification of
  the QWK, and ZipNews.

  Those who use shell connection (i.e. their main computer and disk
  space is on the remote shell and their local computer serves usually
  as a terminal) have to use one program (called packer) at the remote
  computer (e.g. uqwk for Unix) and another (the offline news-reader) on
  their local computer, (e.g. Yarn for PC or MacSoup for Mac). Those who
  use SLIP or PPP connection do not have to use a packer, but only an
  offline news-reader which knows how to work with SLIP/PPP connections.
  (FreeAgent for PC, NewsWatcher for Mac, etc.)

  To get more info on SOUP you are referred to:
  http://www.yak.net/combee/soup12.html .
  Older versions of SOUP called HDPF and SLNP. See the above SOUP
  document for more info.

  A list of offline software can be found in a file `software' on
  directory:
  ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/alt.usenet.offline-reader/
  or you may look at another file called `yet-another-faq' on the above
  directory, for more info on offline readers for shell accounts.

  You may also advice the alt.usenet.offline-reader newsgroup for more
  info.

  Recently, more and more sophisticated offline usenet downloaders are
  introduced. These allow you to set them to monitor periodically, the
  Usenet, for news-messages which meet your needs (filtering them) and
  download them automatically (at times where traffic is lower), and
  even manipulate them. Some of them have a spam filter; some of them
  allow you to automatically decode binary files. Few examples:
  NewsMonger (http://www.techsmith.com),
  NewsRover  (http://www.NewsRover.com),

  I received a nice list of them when used the power search at
  shareware.com with keywords "news" and "automatic"
  (The power search is on: http://www.shareware.com/code/engine/Power).

  Another sites where I found such and other interesting programs are:
  ftp://ftp.uni-mainz.de/pub/pc/mirrors/winsock-l/Windows95/News
  ftp://ftp.uni-magdeburg.de/pub/mirror/win95/winsock-l/News/
  ftp://ftp.tu-dresden.de/pub/soft/win95/mirror/winsock-l/News/
  ftp://ftp.uit.no/pub/pc/winsock-indstate/Windows95/News/
  ftp://ftp.rediris.es/software/windows/network/winsock-l/Windows95/News
  ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pc/win95/network/winsock-l/News/

  Look at the 00_index.txt file on those directories.
----

Q.22: Are there other sources of Usenet beside news-servers? Can I
  access them by telnet or gopher? By BBS? By e-mail? By WWW? and if I
  prefer to post messages to newsgroups via e-mail, can I?

A.22: There are both gopher servers and telnet servers which hold many
  newsgroups and can be accessed without any special permission. 
  They are listed in
  http://www.yahoo.com/News/Usenet/Public_Access_Usenet_Sites/ .
  About BBS's: there are BBS's with access to Usenet. For more about
  lists of BBS's, see A.28.     ////comments are welcomed here////.
  A powerful way to access usenet by WWW (http) is the DejaNews service
  (see A.29). A.29 also includes a reference on how to use it by e-mail.

  * Another Usenet by WWW service is FeedME at http://www.feedme.org/ .
  It supports over 30,000 newsgroups.

  * Billy News - is also a Usenet by WWW service which allows one to
  both read and post news messages. Billy News has the features of a
  regular news-reader: it uses a WWW-technique called "cookies" to
  become a "personal news-reader. If your Web-Browser allows "cookies"
  then you may use the features of: subscribing to news-groups, marking
  news-messages as being read so that you won't have to see again a
  message that you already read, and many other options. It is still in
  a development stage, to add many new features, but at the moment
  their service is not yet fully stable and might not be available at
  all times. You may find it on: http://www.billyboard.com/

  About Usenet by e-mail, please read A.23. You will also find there
  references to lists of e-mail gateways to usenet, so you can post
  messages to newsgroups via e-mail.

  A very useful method of receiving news via e-mail is the Netnews
  Filter at InReference.
  This service allows you to define one or more profiles. Whenever its
  news-server receives a news message which meets any of these profiles,
  you receive its first few lines by e-mail and may ask for the full
  message by e-mail. You may also search mailing lists and make back
  searches (half a year back at the moment), on Usenet.
  You may use this service either from the URL:
  http://www.reference.com or by e-mail.
  For more info on the e-mail interface of this service, send an empty
  message to: user-manual@reference.com .

  There are other services equivalent to InReference (see A.30)
  See also about newsgroups with mirror lists in A.25.
----

Q.23: But I only have e-mail access.

A.23: One can do almost everything on the Internet using e-mail
  only. In many cases it is not easy, as the cruising is not
  interactive. It is, however very valuable to be aware of the
  possibilities, as they might be useful also to people with a direct
  Internet access.
  An excellent references to "doing things via e-mail" are the email4u
  and getit4u documents (two out of the four parts of the 4u series).
  They are wisely formatted to be easy to use as reference texts. You
  may get these files, by sending a message agora@dna.affrc.go.jp
  leaving the subject empty and write ONE of the following lines as the
  body of your message:
  send http://members.aol.com/bombagirl/freeware/email4u.txt
  send ftp://ftp.crl.com/users/iv/iverham/email4u.txt
  send http://inetw.com/home/ak/4useries/email4u.txt
  for receiving email4u, or the same line with email4u.txt replaced
  with getit4u.txt, for receiving the getit4u file.

  A very comprehensive information on how to do everything in the
  Internet using e-mail only, can be found in a manuscript by
  Bob Rankin: `Internet by E-Mail'.
  The document is now available from several automated mail servers.
  To get the latest edition, send e-mail to one of the addresses below.

  To: mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu (for US, Canada & South America)
  Enter only this line in the BODY of the note:
  send usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email

  To: mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk (for Europe, Asia, etc.)
  Enter only this line in the BODY of the note:
  send lis-iis e-access-inet.txt

  You can also get the file by anonymous FTP at one of these sites:
  Site: rtfm.mit.edu
   get pub/usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email
  Site: mailbase.ac.uk
   get pub/lists/lis-iis/files/e-access-inet.txt

  After reading Bob Rankin's document, you may return to reading this
  file. Although this text is not directly aimed at people with e-mail
  access only, one may use the agora servers / other servers mentioned
  in Rankin's document in order to receive or use almost everything
  written here.

  In particular one can use the Agora servers with URLs of the type
  "news:" and "nntp:" explained in A.18 .
  Rankin's document also includes a list of mail to news gateways,
  which allow you to post messages to Usenet newsgroups via e-mail.
  It is in many cases, more convenient to use these gateways, even if
  you can use a news-reader instead.

  Another list of mail to newsgroups gateways which is updated more
  frequently, can be found on
  http://www.sabotage.org/~don/mail2news.html .  This list is usually
  more updated than Rankin's and it contains also another type of mail
  to newsgroups gateways in which you send your message to mail2news@...
  These gateways allow you to crosspost your message to few newsgroups,
  but in order to use them, you must be able to add lines to the header
  of your message. You should be able to do this with your mail program.

  A very powerful method for posting to newsgroups via e-mail is by
  using one of the GetWeb services (at getweb@usa.healthnet.org , at
  getweb@info.lanic.utexas.edu or at getweb@unganisha.idrc.ca)
  GetWeb supports sending forms of the method POST, to WWW via e-mail
  and thus allows one to use e-mail in order to post messages to Usenet
  via the WWW-posting services.

  For more information on using GetWeb for posting forms, send a
  message to one of the GetWeb addresses written above, with the
  following line as the body of the message:
  GET file:/help/FORMS.html
  Note that there is a limit (quota) to the number of accesses
  that one is allowed to do in a single week. For more info get the
  file:
  file:./help/QUOTA.html
  or for a generic help file, use the line:
  GET file:./help/.index.html

  Let us see what WWW-based services can be used via GetWeb for
  postings:
  At the moment, I succeeded only in posting via WWW with the DejaNews
  service on http://postnews.dejanews.com/post.xp (recommended).
  Posting via InReference seems to have temporary problems, (at the time
  of releasing this version) which are supposed to be fixed within a
  short time, so we shall provide the instructions:
  For posting via InReference, you need to be registered
  and get a special password, (registration is free).
  If you already registered with a password then you may use the
  following URL (Insecure, as you must provide the password in the
  e-mail message):
  http://www.reference.com/cgi-bin/pn/go.py?choice=newpost&
  userid=your.email.address&passwd=the.password.for.this.service
  You should treat the two lines above as a single line without blanks.
  You should replace in the above line "your.email.address" with your
  e-mail address, and "the.password.for.this.service" with the password
  that you choose when registered to this service. Do not use any other
  password. If you havn't registered yet, and wish to register, then
  use the following URL:
  http://www.reference.com/cgi-bin/pn/go.py?choice=register1
  DO NOT use the same password, that you use in your account.
  If you forgot your password, you may use:
  http://www.reference.com/cgi-bin/pn/go?choice=login1

  For NewzBot one may try: http://www.jammed.com/~newzbot/post.html
  It is quite an annoying service, but might work (it refused my test
  messages as they were too short for its taste).

  Billy news - uses cookies for identifications so it seems not to be
  possible to use it for postings via GetWeb.
----

Q.24: I wish to test some software/methods for posting to newsgroups.

A.24: ... but you don't want to bombard newsgroups with your test
  messages...
  In fact, there are special newsgroups for test messages. To list some
  of them: comp.test, alt.test, news.test, ...
  There are such newsgroups for most of the hierarchies, for example
  the israel.* hierarchy has israel.test newsgroup etc.
  You may freely post as many news messages as you need to those
  newsgroups and probably nobody will bother to read them beside you.
----

Q.25: Can I subscribe to newsgroups as E-Mail lists?

A.25: Some of the newsgroups are mirrors of e-mail lists, or have
  mirror e-mail lists. For example, all newsgroups beginning with
  bit.listserv.* are mirrors of Listserv e-mail lists.
  Many other newsgroups such as comp.virus or rec.audio.high-end, have
  mirror e-mail lists in a digest format.
  A list of newsgroups which you can subscribe as e-mail lists, with
  instructions, is sent periodically to news.groups and news.lists.misc
  newsgroups.
  You may receive those posts either in the RTFM database (see A.27) on
  directories:
  ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.groups/   or
  ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.lists/  [C.1]
  or you may also receive it by sending a message to:
  mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu leaving the subject empty and typing the
  following line as the body of your message:
  send usenet/news.answers/mail/news-gateways/part1

  or if not there, you may search those files with DejaNews (see A.29).


Comments on A.25:
C.1: The newer updates, will probably be, in directory news.lists.misc/
     instead of news.lists/
----

Q.26: How can I find if there is an archive for some newsgroup?
  Perhaps a WWW page for this newsgroup?

A.26: Lists of newsgroups with archives one may find at
  http://www.pitt.edu/~grouprev/Usenet/Archive-List/newsgroup_archives.html
  or on:
  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/news.lists/newsgroup_archives.html
  also:
  ftp://ftp.sterling.com/moderators/Archives.html . None of the lists
  claims to have a full list of archives for newsgroups.

  There is an effort to provide an updated list of all moderated
  newsgroups archives on:
  http://www.landfield.com/moderators/Archives.html (HTML version)
  ftp://ftp.landfield.com/moderators/Archives.txt (text version)

  An attempt to archive all newsgroups is the DejaNews service (see
  A.29).
  There is also a list of newsgroups with WWW pages at
  http://www.duke.edu/~mg/usenet/www.groups.html .
----

Q.27: Where can I find more information on specific newsgroups? Is
  there an archive of the most important documents on those newsgroups?

A.27: You may receive more information and an archive of the most
  important articles on any specific newsgroup in the address:
  ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/group.name
  for example use
  ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.software.readers
  for more info on news.software.readers. Following the links from this
  web-page, you'll find an archive of the most important files on
  news.software.readers, such as FAQ files (FAQ = Frequently Asked
  Questions is the place where the most common questions on a specific
  topic are made and answered by one or more experts).
  Other places for FAQ files:

  * FAQ List at Ohio State
  http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/FAQ-List.html
  gopher://gopher.switch.ch/11SWITCH/faqs/faq-dir

  * Another one: http://math-www.uio.no/faq/index.html

  * Usenet FAQ Search engine:
  http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/search-usenet-faqs/form
  or if you want directly to search for a keyword (in this example:
  any word which starts with win3):
  http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/search-usenet-faqs/form?find=win3*

  For other places to find FAQ files look at:
  http://www.jazzie.com/ii/internet/faqs.html
----

Q.28: Wouldn't it be easier to replace my Internet Service Provider with
  another with better Usenet service? Are there lists of free/commercial
  Usenet/Internet service providers?

A.28: Most of the Internet service providers (ISP's) or Internet Access
  Providers (IAP's) provide a Usenet access. There are Public access
  internet providers, free of charge, such as the Freenets (e.g. telnet
  to freenet-in-a.cwru.edu), RAIN (http://www.rain.org), Prairienet
  (http://www.prairienet.org), Apana (for Australia only;
  http://www.apana.org.au), Nyx (telnet to nyx.cs.du.edu), and more.
  (In the above I partially fell into the trap of writing a never ending
  and rapidly changing list).
  Some give you a shell account with disk space, free of charge, and you
  can login through telnet from your original host. Others allow you to
  access the Internet/Usenet via a slip/ppp connection.  BBS's may also
  be relevant. One may of-course replace one's ISP but prices, number of
  phone lines, phone bills (distance), and other arguments should come
  into consideration.

  Some list of lists of either free or commercial BBS's
  and ISP's would be:
  01. http://ultralist.upx.net/
      An impressive list of lists of commercial ISP's.
  02. http://www.herbison.com/herbison/iap_meta_list.html
      another list of lists.
  03. http://duke.usask.ca/~scottp/free.html
      for a list of Freenets,
      or http://www.usask.ca/~scottp/ for a link to the list (as the
      address of the list may change.
  04. http://ralph.gmu.edu/~pbaker/
      "Community networks: an online guide to resources" with relevant
      links.
  05. Another site with links to Free Internet Access is:
      http://freeweb.com/freeweb/access.htm
  06. http://www.cais.com/morino/htdocs/pandhome.htm
      "directory of public access networks" as it says. Searchable.
  07. http://www.thebbslist.com
      a list of commercial and free BBS's.
  08. http://www.vni.net/thedirectory/
      a list of BBS's and ISP's.
  09. A list of BBS's with Internet connection maintained by SBAY (an
      organization which provide a FREE internet connections via UUCP.
      For more info on SBAY look at http://www.sbay.org).
      The list can be obtained by various means. One of them:
      http://dkeep.com/sbi.htm . For other means you may type
      `finger sbi@dkeep.com'
  10. Commercial ISP's in USA/Canada by area code: send an e-mail
      message to ISP@Penny-a-Pic.com . Type "???" in the
      subject prompt, where `???' should be replaced by the (phone) area
      code you're interested in.
  11. For another such a service by e-mail, send a message to
      iap-request@best.be with "info" (without the quotes) as the
      subject.
  12. A short list of commercial Usenet access providers, is on:
      http://www.slip.net/~rain/newshunt.shtml

     As I share the JFI, I do not include here most of the ISPs that
     are already listed on UltraList.

  More info can be found on
  http://www.ege.edu.tr/mirror/presno/bok/v7.html

  If none of the sites helps you. Try to send a question to the
  alt.internet.access.wanted or the biz.comp.services, or the
  alt.internet.bbs, alt.bbs and alt.bbs.lists newsgroups.


Comments on A.28:
* For the e-mail service at penny-a-pic, The system will reject your
  request if:
  1. You are asking for the same area code more than once within a
     period of 10 days.
  2. You have reached you maximum of 5 requests within a 90 day period.

* In order to get more info on JFI, send e-mail to uzipaz.ar@poboxes.com
  leaving the body empty and typing "get jfi.let" as the subject
  (without the quotes).
----

Q.29: What is the DejaNews service ?  Are there Usenet Search Engines?

A.29: DejaNews is a free service accessible via HTTP (the most common
  communication on the World Wide Web). It allows you to search Usenet
  news in a very wise way. Unlike most news-servers, it holds over 50
  gigabyte of data, i.e. it holds news ranging back to Mar 1995 and not
  only that there is no intention to delete any of them, but on the
  contrary, to add and catalog news even backward, to dates before Mar
  1995.
  You can search by subject, title, dates, newsgroups, authors, and
  even much more sophisticated searches, and ways to sort the results.
  In order to access DejaNews service, use http://www.dejanews.com/ .
  You may use DejaNews in order to browse news: enter to
  http://www.dejanews.com/home_ps.shtml , and type
  "~g news.group.name" in the search option, where news.group.name
  should be replaced by the name of the newsgroup to be read, and as
  usual, without the quotation marks.
  If you want to do it directly you may use instead:
  http://search.dejanews.com/nph-dnquery.xp?query=%7Eg%20news.grp.nm
  &maxhits=120
  Where the two above lines should be considered as a single line with
  no blanks, and where news.grp.nm should be replaced with the newsgroup
  you wish to read. You may change the number 120 to any number you may
  wish, where this number is the number of news messages that will be
  listed per single Web-page. If the second line is omitted, the default
  number of 25 is set for the number of news per Web-page.

  Of-course, this URL can be used also with other options explained in
  G. Boyd's document wsdeja.faq (see below near the end of this answer).

  You may also use DejaNews for posting messages to newsgroups.

  Another NetNews Search Engine is the AltaVista.
  AltaVista is a Generic Search Engine. You may choose to make the
  search in its Usenet database.
  Unlike DejaNews, the AltaVista does remove old news articles.
  The AltaVista address is http://www.altavista.digital.com/ .

  Another one is the Excite. Like AltaVista it is a generic Search
  Engine, and it has a two week Usenet database (less than AltaVista and
  much less than DejaNews). You may find it on http://www.excite.com .

  Since, one can use e-mail to obtain Web-Pages, it is possible to
  query DejaNews/AltaVista using e-mail. The problem is of-course, to
  understand the format. Gerald E. Boyd, wrote instructions on how
  to use Search-Engines via e-mail. You may receive his documents,
  by anonymous ftp to ftp.netcom.com on the directory pub/gb/gboyd/
  you may find the info documents:
  wsdeja.faq (for DejaNews)
  wsalta.faq (for AltaVista)
  wsexcite.faq (for Excite)
  and many other files on other Search Engines.
  You may receive these files by e-mail, using ftpmail services. For
  example: you may send a message to either ftpmail@src.doc.ic.ac.uk, or
  ftpmail@ftp.sunet.se, with the following lines as the body of your
  message:

  open ftp.netcom.com anonymous Y_E_ADDRESS
  chdir pub/gb/gboyd
  ...
  quit

  where you should put your e-mail address instead of Y_E_ADDRESS
  and where you may put one or more of the following lines instead of
  the three dots:
  get wsdeja.faq
  get wsalta.faq
  get wsexcite.faq
  get wscrack.faq
  get wsintro.faq
  ...
  dir

  You may use other ftpmail services as well (see Dr.Bob's document on
  A.23) but you should use the `open' command as stated above, or
  otherwise, it may not work.

Comments on A.29:
* Usenet grows exponentially. both in number of newsgroups, in number
  of messages sent to each newsgroup, and in number of people reading
  it. With this in mind, it will be much harder to maintain such a
  service as DejaNews as time goes on. DejaNews claim that their main
  purpose in giving this service is not commercial (their main income
  comes from advertisement). But they do not promise to give all
  services freely in the future. They claim, however, that if they will
  decide to make a fee, they will charge it only for the more advanced
  services they intend to implement.
----

Q.30: What about the Netnews Filter Service at Stanford? The one at
  InReference? The one at Vigilant?

A.30: The NetNews Filtering Service at Stanford University is no longer
  available. All subscribers were transferred to InReference.
  The Service at InReference is more powerful (See A.21).

  Vigilant service was also shut down.

  Stanford University gives its program for filtering Usenet messages
  for free (See ftp://db.stanford.edu/pub/sift/sift.ps for a text in
  PostScript), so one may assume that the number of such services will
  grow. Their program is called SIFT (Stanford Information Filtering
  Tool).
  The difference between those services is mainly due to the difference
  between the different news-servers of those sites.
  
  Another Usenet filtering service is the NewsSIEVE server at:
  http://jod.informatik.uni-bonn.de:8080/eng/index.html  .
  Unlike other filtering services, this one cannot be accessed directly
  by e-mail. You may either use your Web-browser (which should have a
  support for Java), or via telnet. This service started on Apr 1996,
  and supporting 7450 newsgroups (checked on 1 Oct 1997, but rapidly
  growing).  You may define what newsgroups are of interest for you, and
  then, according to info (grades) that you provide them to the articles
  that you read, they construct and improve the filtering for you. After
  some usage of it, the filter should be rather wisely chosen to meet
  your preferences. It is now possible to post your replies to news
  messages directly from the NewsSIEVE'S Reader-Applet.
----

Q.31: There are few terms in the Usenet jargon that I don't understand,
  or wish to get more info on them.

A.31: The answer here is extended to terms from the
  Usenet/Internet/computation jargon.

  A great encyclopedic dictionary of internet/computation terms is on
  Foldoc:  http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/ and has mirrors in USA on:
  http://wagner.princeton.edu/foldoc , http://www.instantweb.com/foldoc/
  http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/foldoc and
  http://www.nightflight.com/foldoc .

  Another jargon lexicon is `The Jargon File 3.0.0' on
   http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~rene/jargon/ (Europe)
   or copies of it on:
  Europe:          http://www.phil.uni-sb.de/fun/jargon/index.html
  North America:   http://www.monmouth.com/~jshahom/jargon/index.html
   "               http://serv2.fwi.com/~gziegler/jargon/
   "               http://www.clueless.com/jargon
  Australia:       http://www.it.com.au/jargon/


Comments on A.31:
* If you use foldoc via e-mail, via Dr. Bob's method for WWW by e-mail
  (A.23), use the line:
  http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/foldoc?query=****
  where you should replace the `****' with the term you want to search.
  If you want to use a term with more than one word such as
  "source code" use `+' sign between the words for example to search
  for the definition of `source code use:
  http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/foldoc?query=source+code
----
Q.32: Can you recommend a general source for more information on Usenet?

A.32:
  A BASIC INTROduction to Usenet can be found on:
  1. CyberCourse - this is an excellent series of 5 lectures on Usenet
     (parts 1-5).  In order to receive the first lecture you should send
     an empty message to: usenet-part1@newbie.net , and you may guess
     how to retrieve the other parts (part2 to part5).
  2. Roadmap lectures, lecture number 8 on 
     http://www.brandonu.ca/~ennsnr/Resources/Roadmap/map08.html
     or send a message to LISTSERV@UA1VM.UA.EDU with empty subject and
     a single line as the body of the message:
     GET MAP08 LESSON F=MAIL
     (the whole set of Roadmap lectures can be found on:
     http://www.brandonu.ca/~ennsnr/Resources/Roadmap/ or send a
     message to the above address with the line:
     GET MAP PACKAGE F=MAIL
     in the body of the message)
     You may also subscribe to the Roadmap96 Listserv list for receiving
     the Roadmap lectures as a series of lectures by e-mail. Every two
     weeks, a new workshop will begin. In order to subscribe to the next
     workshop, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTS.INTERNIC.NET leaving the
     subject empty and type the following single line as the body of
     your message:
     SUB ROADMAP96 Your_First_Name Your_Last_Name
     where as usual you should put your real first name and last name
     instead of Your_First_Name and Your_Last_Name.
  3. Zen and the Art of Internet, version 1, Chap. 4:
     http://sundance.cso.uiuc.edu/Publications/Other/Zen/zen-1.0_5.html
     or one of the files: zen-1.0.dvi.Z , zen-1.0.tar.Z , zen-1.0.txt on
     directory: ftp://ftp.csn.org/pub/net/zen/ .
  4. EFF guide to the Internet, Chaps. 3 and 4:
     http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_info/EFF_Net_Guide/
  5. Newbie's Guides for the New and Old User:
     http://www.ug.cs.dal.ca/pub/online-dir/internet/usenet/Index.html
  6. `How to Read the Network News':
     http://galway.informatik.uni-kl.de/comp/Internet/news-1.html
     and `How to Use Usenet Effectively':
     http://galway.informatik.uni-kl.de/comp/Internet/news-2.html
  7. http://www.newbie-u.com/news/welcome2.html is a very recommended
     introductory text.

  A GENERAL INFO about Usenet can be found on:
  1. Yahoo, at  http://www.yahoo.com/News/Usenet/
  2. Usenet Info Center, at http://sunsite.unc.edu/usenet-i/ (obsolete)
  3. MG's House of News Knowledge, at http://www.duke.edu/~mg/usenet/
  4. Maas Info HTML documents, on any of the following sites:
     http://www.shsu.edu/ftp/MaasInfo/MaasInfo.UseNet.html
     ftp://ftp.shsu.edu/doc/MaasInfo/MaasInfo.UseNet.html
     gopher://ftp.edu.tw:72/h0/documents/Internet/MaasInfo/MaasInfo.UseNet.html
     ftp://ftp.switch.ch/docs/MaasInfo/MaasInfo.UseNet.html
  5. Infinite Ink's documents, on:
     http://www.jazzie.com/ii/internet/mailnews.html
  6. Usenet RKT (Rapid Knowledge Transfer) on:
     http://www.mibsoftware.com/userkt/
  7. http://www.imc.org/usenet-main.html holds links to FAQs about
     Usenet, and to Usenet standards.

  Some milestones in the HISTORY OF USENET can be found in "A Short
  History of the Net" on http://www.ocean.ic.net/ftp/doc/snethist.html
  or ftp://ftp.ocean.ic.net/pub/doc/snethist.html .
  You may receive the longer version by replacing snethist.html by
  nethist.html in any of the last two addresses.
  You may find there a very nice story on how three frustrated and
  brilliant people succeeded in entering their newsgroups through the
  back door, without violating any of the Usenet ethics, by inventing
  an alternative net: the Alternet (known today as the anarchic alt
  hierarchy).

  Very good source of information on the history of computer networks,
  including Usenet, and including tables on Usenet growth can be found
  in Hobbes' Internet Timeline on:
  http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
  or via e-mail by sending an empty message to:
  timeline@hobbes.mitre.org

  Another document on the HISTORY and future of Usenet and Usenet
  culture, can be found in Chaps. 2, 3 and 4 of NetBook on:
  http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/ .


Comments on A.32:
* Some sources still consider the Alternet (or the alt hierarchy) as not
  part of the Usenet. Some other sources consider only newsgroups
  belonging to the "big eight" as Usenet newsgroups, and all others as
  non-Usenet newsgroups. Most of the sources treat all public newsgroups
  as part of the Usenet.
----

Q.33: Can I distribute this file?

A.33: You may distribute it freely. You may cut, and edit the file as
  you wish, as long as the changes are made under your name.
  This document can be sent for free, and by anyone, and you may not
  use it in a manner which may restrict this right.
----

A General comment:
* Please do send me corrections, and comments on the article or on my
  English. Notice that I do not hold older versions of this article, so
  it won't help me much to receive a comment such as "on line 45, word
  number 8 ....".

On Acknowledgments:
  My decision was not to add the very long (and very boring to most of
  us) list of kind people who contributed to my knowledge written above,
  or sent me their comments.
  I hope, though, that I didn't forget any of them, (their messages are
  kept in a special folder).
--------------------- Last Line of ua.txt ------------------------------
