How Can I Access Usenet?

Anyone with an Internet connection can access Usenet. Many ISP's have a Usenet server as part of the service they offer. All you need is a newsreader and the address of your ISP's news server.  A good ISP will also have it's own support groups on the server, where you can have direct contact with tech support and with other users.

Commercial News Servers

If your ISP does not have a news server, there are a number of commercial news providers available on a subscription basis. I use Giganews, which has almost 70,000 groups, very good download speed, and long article retention. 

Retention time is important because some servers only retain postings for a short time. Typically, on an ISP's server, large binary files might disappear in a couple of days, or in extreme cases, in a few hours. Non-binary (smaller text-based) postings are usually kept longer. Commercial Usenet services might keep these postings for weeks, and text postings for months.

Some other Commercial News Providers are The Newsgroups.com, Supernews, and Newscene.  A quick search on the web will yield a good list of many other commercial news providers.  Once you find one you are interested in, do a  Google Group search of the group  alt.binaries.news-server-comparison.  Here you will find discussions, sometimes heated, about the merits of all the different commercial providers.

Free Servers

There are also an ever-changing number of free servers available. These may come and go, or may limit public access. The best way to search for these is to do a yahoo or google search. Connection speed and retention are not necessarily as good as the paid servers, or your local ISP's server.  Quite often, servers showing up on the free servers list are actually servers that have been set up incorrectly, leaving the door open for anyone to use.  Access to these disappears quickly.

Some manufacturer's also provide newsgroups to support their products and provide a forum for interaction among users. These manufacturer groups are accessible a number of ways:

Microsoft provides an extensive newsgroup structure.  This is available through their web site,  http://communities2.microsoft.com/home/msnewsgroups.aspx  These groups are monitored by volunteer MVP's who are skilled in the topics each group covers. Their newsgroups are also generally mirrored on most news servers, so you can read them with your own newsreader.

Usenet on the Web

If you prefer a web-based interface, Google owns the complete archive of news postings, back to the very beginning.  I much prefer using a newsreader rather then the web.  The newsreader is much more intuitive and the whole experience is much richer, but no news-server, free or commercial, has an archive as complete as Googles.

Now that we've got your interest, lets look at some of the software available for newsreading.

Or, jump straight to setting up a new Usenet account with Outlook Express