Options for Accessing Newsgroups

Article contributed by Beth Rosengard

Newsgroups can be a great resource for just about any subject you care to name. Interested in cats, Cadillacs, cheese, computers or Microsoft Word? You’re not alone, and there’s a newsgroup out there where like-minded people are discussing those very topics!

Chances are about even, that if you stumbled across this page you’re already familiar with newsgroups; that doesn’t mean, however, that you’re accessing them in the easiest or most efficient way. That’s what this article is about. And if you’ve never used newsgroups at all, this is your opportunity to learn how.

Newsgroups are alternatives to Mailing Lists (a.k.a Listservs) and Web Forums. To get peer support from a Mailing List, you have to first subscribe and then, depending on the subscription method you choose, you’ll receive one digest email per day or any number of individual emails per day – every day for as long as you’re subscribed. If you want to participate in a Web Forum, on the other hand, you must fire up a browser and go to the web site that hosts the forum.

Newsgroups offer the best of both worlds: You can access them any time you like (they don’t come to you – you go to them); you can get to them via the web; or you can access them using your email client and/or a dedicated newsreader, very much like email.

Access Via the Web

Reading newsgroups via the web is probably the most common, if not the most efficient method. (We’ll get to that in the next section.) Regardless, many people prefer web interfaces or – when traveling or working behind firewalls, for instance – have no alternative.

Google is your best portal to virtually all the newsgroups on the Usenet (User’s Network). If you want to find out what newsgroups are available by general category (news, science, health, business, computers, etc.), try the main Google Groups page. But if there’s a specific topic, author, date range, newsgroup or even message that you’d like to look up, go directly to Google’s Advanced Groups Search. Here you can narrow your search using various criteria to get you exactly where you want to go. You can also search the archives of virtually any newsgroup back to 1981 (which is just about when Usenet began).
In order to post a question via Google or reply to another user, you will have to register – but the service is free. There are a couple of disadvantages to using Google, however: 1) it may take hours before your post shows up (and then you’ll have to wait for any replies); 2) you may not like the user interface (how the posts are displayed on the screen, the method of organizing, or “threading,” the posts, etc.); and 3) fast as it is, it’s still slower than using a newsreader.
Communities websites are another web avenue to newsgroups. Microsoft, for instance, provides a portal to all of its own newsgroups here. The best portal to Microsoft's Mac newsgroups, however, is via the Mactopia website. This site has the advantage of being fast as well as providing a convenient method of searching the forums of the various Office applications. The disadvantages to communities websites vary from site to site though in all cases you're limited to just those newsgroups offered by the host. Additionally, the user interfaces are vastly different (compare Mactopia's interface above to that of Apple, for instance).

Access Via Newsreaders

The optimal method for accessing newsgroups is directly via the Usenet using a newsreader. The Usenet depends on NNTP – Network News Transfer Protocol – the newsgroup "language". As my fellow MVP John McGhie explained to me in my novice newsreading days (not so long ago, trust me!):

NNTP is a "store and forward" technology. All of the news servers in the world are connected in a giant spider web. Any post that makes it onto any one of them will be stored and forwarded to all its neighbors. After ten days or so, the post has done a complete circuit of the entire internet and is available on everyone's news server all over the world.

A server, in this context, is a computer that hosts newsgroups, hence a “news server”. If you’re interested in learning more about Usenet and NNTP, check out these articles: What is Usenet, Anyway? and Usenet History.

So ... how do you access the Usenet directly? You need a newsreader (NNTP client). Seeing that you’re reading this article on a site about Mac Word, the chances are pretty high that you own the entire Microsoft Mac Office suite, which means that you probably have Entourage – and Entourage just happens to include an NNTP client. If you don’t have Office, or if you prefer another email client that does not offer newsreading (like Apple's Mail), you can get any one of a number of dedicated newsreaders (see here for some possibilities). Some people prefer dedicated newsreaders, especially if they’re “power” newsgroup readers, since such applications will have features and options not available in more basic newsreaders. Personally, I have found Entourage’s newsreading capabilities to be quite sufficient for my purposes.

In the next section you’ll find an explanation for how to set up Entourage to read newsgroups. If your preferred email client has newsreading capabilities, check its Help for instructions. Ditto if you decide to get a dedicated newsreader.

Return to Top

Setting up Entourage for Newsreading

The Microsoft News Server

If you own Entourage 2001, X, 2004 or 2008, then the Microsoft News Server should already be installed (near the bottom of your folder list) by default. Otherwise, you will have to create an account for it as follows. (We’ll get to other news servers in a moment.)

Go to Tools menu> Accounts and click on the News tab.
At the top of the window, click on New to create a new News account.
Fill in the blanks as follows:

Account Name: Microsoft News Server

Email Account: Whatever account you wish to send from. (See the next section to avoid attracting spam!)

News Server: msnews.microsoft.com

This server requires me to log on: It doesn’t, so leave this unchecked.

Now click on the Options tab and take a look at what’s offered. You may wish to limit the amount of message headers that are downloaded at a time. I have mine set at 100.
Okay your way out of the Account dialogs and you will now see a server icon for the Microsoft News Server on your folder list.

The first time you click on this news server icon, you will be asked if you want to download the list of newsgroups. Say Yes and the list will appear in your Preview Pane. Use the Quick Search box at the top (“Display newsgroups containing:”) to isolate the newsgroups you’re interested in. When you find one, select it and click Subscribe. The newsgroup will now appear bolded in the Preview Pane and will also show up when you click the “expand arrow” next to the server icon in the folder list.

You can then choose to open a subscribed newsgroup in one of two ways. Both methods get you to the same place. Use whichever is easiest for you.

Go to View> Subscribed Only to bring up a list of your subscribed newsgroups in the Preview Pane. Then double-click on the newsgroup you’re interested in. This method opens the group in a separate window. (Note: You can set up a keystroke for View> Subscribed Only from System Preferences> Keyboard & Mouse> Keyboard Shortcuts)
Click on the “expand arrow” next to the server icon in the folder list to see all your subscribed groups and then click on the one you want. This method opens the group so it looks exactly like any mail folder you might click on.

Note that you’ll find Microsoft’s Macintosh newsgroups by searching on mac. (that’s mac and then a period). The current newsgroups for the Mac Office applications use this format: microsoft.public.mac.office.***.

From then on, you’re on your own. It’s exactly like reading email except that you cannot delete messages and you reply to the newsgroup by hitting the “newspaper” icon, not the regular Reply button. (And a few other things, but that’s what you’ll notice right off.) For additional tips on using Entourage as a newsreader – including how to read news offline, how to empty the news cache and more, see here.

Other News Servers

Most ISPs have their own news server. My ISP, Earthlink, provides a server which carries over 30,000 newsgroups. Check with your ISP to find out if they provide a news server, how it is designated (what setting to use in the “News Server” pane of the Accounts setup dialog), and whether or not their server requires you to log on. After that, setting up the account is identical to the procedure outlined above.

If your ISP does not provide a news server, you still have options for accessing the newsgroups via NNTP, though on a fee basis. Check out Giganews.

Return to Top

Fighting Newsgroup Spam

Newsgroups are a boon for spammers (and virus writers!) looking to harvest email addresses to spread their ubiquitous garbage. There are a couple of measures you can take to avoid becoming grist for the spammers’ mill. One is to use a secondary account for posting to newsgroups; the other is to set up a “dummy” email address, such as <yourname@NOSPAM.domain.com.invalid>, in association with an account which will send but not receive. For a step-by-step on both of these methods, see here.

If you do decide to post to the newsgroups from a dummy email address, don’t forget to sign your name (a first name will do) at the bottom of your message. If you end up posting several questions or follow-ups, it will make you more memorable and possibly get you a better answer. Besides, it’s the courteous thing to do!

Netiquette

You’ll get the best results on newsgroups if you compose your posts according to a simple set of guidelines and keep common courtesy in mind at all times. Here are some points to keep in mind ...

My Top 10...

Always reply to the newsgroup and not privately to the individual unless invited to do so! In Entourage, this means clicking on the “newspaper” icon rather than the normal Reply button.
When posting about computer software, always give your operating system and application version numbers. Also note if you have updated your software and to what levels.
Make your Subject heading descriptive of your question. “Help!” is not a useful title.
Make a separate post for each unrelated question and title it appropriately.
Maintain the “thread” (chain of related posts) by hitting “Reply to Newsgroup” (or “Post a follow-up to this message” in Google). Don’t start a new thread to reply to an existing post and don’t change the Subject (title) unless you have good reason to. If you change the Subject, you will “break the thread” in newsreaders capable of advanced threading features.
If a discussion changes topic mid-thread, as often happens, change the thread’s Subject appropriately. Example: Unicode Fonts [was “Re: Change my default font”].
Always quote back at least the most relevant part of the post that you are replying to, for reference; but delete lengthy, unnecessary portions.
When quoting back an entire thread, edit out extraneous sections of previous posts.
Don’t send attachments. Anyone knowledgeable enough to answer your question is also knowledgeable enough not to risk opening an attachment from a stranger. Instead, post the attachment to a web server if you can, and include a link to it in your message. As a corollary (and to sneak an 11^th point into my Top 10), avoid HTML messages unless there’s a very good reason to use them (like reproducing AppleScript code). HTML can make a hash out of quoting back, and besides that, many people have their newsreaders set to display as plain text anyway so if you’re depending on HTML formatting to make your point, they won’t see it.
Avoid cross-posting (addressing your post to more than one newsgroup) whenever possible. If you really believe it’s necessary, at least note at the top of your message that you have done so. Example: Cross-posted to the MacWord and Entourage newsgroups. Avoid multi-posting (sending the same or similar posts with each one addressed to a different newsgroup) altogether.

A Last Word...

Dare I bring up the subject of top-posting vs. bottom-posting? Sure, why not.

The dyed-in-the-wool bottom-poster will insist that reading from the top of a page to the bottom is the natural thing to do and therefore your reply should always be at the bottom (and besides that, he would say, it’s the traditional way to do it).

His dyed-in-the-wool opposite would insist that it makes more sense to put your reply at the top of the page because then the reader doesn’t have to scroll endlessly to the bottom to find your reply (and besides that, she would say, you often don’t need to reference the history of the thread, so why make someone scroll past it; yet it’s there if you need it).

Here are my own rules of thumb (and I only break them once in a while): If a thread is already trending downwards as a result of previous bottom-posting, then follow suit by bottom-posting; if a thread is already trending upwards as a result of previous top-posting, then – guess what? – follow suit by top-posting. If you’re responding only to the last post in a thread and the rest of it is irrelevant, delete all but the single relevant post and then reply whichever way you prefer! Ditto if you’re the first responder to a post.

Finally, it is always appropriate to post in-line by inserting multiple replies into a post in response to specific points, providing that you trim unnecessary text from previous posts.

See you on the newsgroups!

Return to Top