Tips to access Usenet |
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You can access Usenet through Email, Telnet (painful and slow method so will not covered here), World Wide Web and NNTP server using a News reader software.
If you are blessed with a TCP/IP account then the easiest way to access Usenet is through a News reader.
But Free Agent stands out as the best News reader because it allows offline reading and replying to news articles.
Last Updated June 15th, 1997
News server name : 199.45.151.9
accepts posting, articles are current, and there are 41000 newsgroups
If you have problems with the above news servers you can use VSNL's News server news.vsnl.net.in
VSNL's news server is having some problems (they are experimenting) keep trying, sometimes it
works. VSNL shell users can simply use Lynx to read and post News. Just type
the URL news:news.group.name
Remember, this section will be updated frequently to give you the best of publicly accessible news servers. Send a mail to ksamy@pppindia.com if the above servers are denying access to you. We will then provide you with another set of News servers.
Replace the "soc.culture.indian" newsgroup name with any of your favourite newsgroup. You can send upto 10 requests by a single email. That means
you can request 10 newsgroups by a single email.
You will get a return email immediately (in less than a minute)
that will contain the Subject header and Name of the person
who has posted the article. If you notice carefully each
line is suffixed with a hyper-reference like [1], [2] and so
on.
If you want to retrieve the articles on a particular
subject, all you have to do is send a reply mail immediately
by selecting the reply option in your email software.
Don't include the original message. Just type the hyper-
reference number (with out the brackets) corresponding to the Subject.
You can type any number of hyper-references ina single line
with a space inbetween. Like this 1 2 3 4 5
You will get an email immediately with the corresponding article.
All the articles are current and the response is really
quick.
Caution : Request the article immediately after getting
the subject headers, otherwise you will end up receiving articles
on a different subject.
Don't forget to type an appropriate subject and include your email address in the message body.
Confirmation of your posting:::
To check whether your posting has really been posted, do a search in Altavista
or Dejanews either using your name or any other word as a keyword. Normally
your article will be posted within few hours and will
be indexed in Altavista or Dejanews within 24 hours after posting.
Or send a test post to the newsgroup alt.test without typing
the word ignore. You will get a confirmation message that the
article has been posted and it will also give you some info on the time
taken to post.
Always make it a point check whether your article is posted or not through Altavista or Dejanews. This applies even if you are using a NNTP server because some servers accept postings but will never be seen by anybody. You can access Usenet by a combination of all the above methods. For eg: You can read articles using NNTP server (some servers will not accept postings) and post articles through Email/WWW.