Newsgroups

Usenet Newsgroups are forums set up to allow people with similar interests to discuss specific topics. Thousands of newsgroups, with multiple topics, are available. The name Newsgroup is very misleading. While some of these discussion areas do have news related information, they are more accurately described as discussion groups; areas for people to discuss specific topics, rather than to post news related information.

News Readers

There are many different news readers available. News readers vary in the features they offer. The basic news reader allows you to read and post messages. Some of the more advanced news readers are Free Agent, Netscape News, and Microsoft Internet News. Some of the more popular features on these mail readers are news threads, image viewing, and the ability to view multiple news services.

Newsgroups function very much like e-mail. You can send and read the news group message much like you can with e-mail. The major difference is with the news groups, when you post a message, instead of one person seeing the message, it is posted globally all over the world, so anyone who reads that particular newsgroup can view your message.

You can use many of the familiar features from your mail program, such as reply, forward, reply to all, and so forth. One difference you will see with your news reader is the ability to post or reply to either the user who posted the message.or reply to the newsgroup in which the message originally appeared. Along with these functions, you can also attach files to news posts, much like you can with e-mail. As with e-mail, the file attachments are encoded in one of the three major formats (MIME, Base64, UUEncode).