Newsgroups

Internet Accounts News dialogue box

Newsgroup Subscriptions dialogue box

Newsgroups are a collection of different discussion groups. They are similar to forums found on the Internet in that they start by one person asking a question or making a point and others reply to it and eventually we have a string of messages rgarding that particular item, this is known as a message thread.

Unlike forum messages you find on the Internet these separate newsgroups are collectively part of the Usenet Service, this network of nwwsgroups were formed before the Internet was thought of and was the first network for sending and receiving e-mails and messages and they require a news reader to read the messages on it.

There are separate stand alone newsreaders or newsreaders that are incorporated into another program such as Outlook Express and not all Internet Service provider's (ISP's) provide newsgroup access, some provide access to a limited number of newsgroups, some provide access to all the newsgroups, but you have to think that there are thousands and thousands of different newsgroups that make oup the usenet service.

They are divided into different categories, (a hierarchy) which make it easier to find messages that you are looking for, an example of these would be .ALT, .BIZ. .Chile, .Chinese, so as you can see they cover general and international. These are also subdivided further in order to get more sepcific, take an example from one of those in the list in the example labelled Newsgroup Subscriptions dialogue box. You can see that they start with alt. then they are given another category called binaries (you'll find a lot of those on usenet), then they are given a further sub-category called movies and could be further subdivided into the type of movie, eg. classic, so if I was looking for a classic movie of some particular type, I could look at alt.binaries.movies.calssic

In the example labelled Newsgroup Subscriptions dialogue box above you can see that I have subscribed to quite a few movies newsgroups, (if you want to download any messages from a newsgroup you must first subscribe to it). You can find out how tgis is done by clikcing on the following link, how to subscribe to a newsgroup