Subscribing to Newsgroups

The first thing you want to do when you start reading news is to decide which newsgroups you want to read. The process of selecting the newsgroups is known as subscribing.

Most news readers offer you a list of available newsgroups so that you can select the ones in which you’re interested. The actual process of subscribing varies between news-reading software packages, but it usually involves selecting a series of newsgroups from a list. From then on, only the groups that you’ve subscribed to are visible when you read news. You can always subscribe to additional groups anytime you want or unsubscribe from a group in which you’re no longer interested.

Remember the earlier mention of over twenty thousand newsgroups? If your newsreader is set to download the entire list of all newgroups carried by your news server, receiving this list may take a while.

Reading News

After you subscribe to your newsgroups, you can begin reading news. You select a newsgroup from a list of your subscribed groups. Your news reader displays a list of article subjects for the various articles in the newsgroup. These subjects may be sorted in some order, or they may be unsorted, depending on your news reader. Some news readers can sort articles based on subject, showing which articles are replies to other articles. This is known as threading.

When you select an article to read, you see several lines of information at the top of the article. These lines make up the article header. The header contains lots of information about the article, including the author, the date it was written, the subject, the newsgroups that the article was posted to, and the path the article took to get to your site. You also might see additional information, such as the organization the author is affiliated with and a set of keywords that identify the content of an article.

Under most news readers, an article is marked as read when you look at it. Usually, only new articles are displayed when you select a newsgroup. This means that after you look at an article, it probably won’t show up in your article list again. If you want to keep the article, you can save it to disk or print it. You can also usually mark the article as unread so that your news reader displays it again the next time you go into the newsgroup. Many news readers also allow you to list old articles; this way, you have a list of old news articles in a newsgroup that are marked as having been read but haven’t yet been deleted by the news system.

Replying via E-Mail

After you read an article, you may decide that you want to comment on the topic under discussion. If your information isn’t of general interest to everyone in the newsgroup, you may want to reply to the article via e-mail, which most news readers allow you the option of doing.

If you choose to reply through e-mail, the news reader software uses the information in the article header to figure out the e-mail address of the author and then invokes an e-mail editor for you to edit your message. You usually also have the option of including the original article in your reply. If you do include the original article, make sure that you edit the original message to include only the relevant portions. After you finish editing your reply, you can send your e-mail message to the article’s author.

Because of the common use of e-mail, especially e-mail addresses gleaned from Usenet postings, many Usenet posters munge, or modify, their e-mail addresses to stop automated address collectors from being able to send them unsolicited commercial e-mail, known as spam. The poster’s e-mail address may have an obvious false entry and look something like “mjameson@IHATESPAM.netcrom.com.” Alternatively, the poster may have instructions in his sigfile on what to change in the reply-to address to actually reach him. For example, a poster with a false address of “sbarnes@sequoia.skytails.org” might have instructions in his sigfile to “Replace ‘tails’ with ‘wings’ to reply.”