OT: How to access alt.food.wine if I have msn.com

Until you perhaps decide on something better, there is a very easy way to access all of Usenet. Just go to Google and click on groups. You can then select and read from any group you wish. If you want to post, you must register with Google. It is simple and all you need is a working e-mail address. Everything is free. Posts can take up to a few hours to appear, and this is the main disadvantage of posting at Google.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

Google groups is certainly a workable solution, although you'd miss any posts made with X-No-Archive set in the headers (IIRC, only Marcel Lachenmann uses it in this group). Alternatively, there are a number of free news servers that carry alt.food.wine. You can get a list of them from newzbot:

(note: service may vary from decent to execrable -- look at their statistics)

Another good solution is to sign up for the free service available from news.uni-berlin.de:

Finally, there are also commercial Usenet servers. Some of the better known of them are Airnews, Altopia, Giganews, Newsfeed, Supernews, Newscene and Teranews.

Mark Lipton

i just read Mark Lipton's response and found that I had not read the end of your post mentioning Google - sorry. I still use Google for posts to another Usenet group with responses going to another e-mail address. It pays to have several e-mail accounts so you can cut them off as they start receiving more spam than you care to handle. I could use up to 20 e-mail accounts at my domain, but I do not plan to use any of them for posts because of the spam problem.

I am on MSN for the computer. I believe that somewhere in that maze of MSN information that can be reached from the home page, you can find some discussion of NGs. MSN did carry Usenet at one time, but quit a few months ago. Part of the reason may be that Usenet posts generate so much spam traffic.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

You are welcome to use my server to post and read current postings. Unfortunately I've been having a bit of disc space problems (what mp3s??) so my archiving is only carrying articles for 4 or 5 days or so which I'll sort out as soon as I move some stuff onto my usb hdd.

Anyway, if you use Outlook Express or something like that to read news, just type "shiraz.hipgeeks.net" as your news server and you should be up and running.

I'd strongly support this solution - far superior to groups.google imnsho -, using it myself for years: It's free, it's well serviced, it's fast, and it has quite a long holding time of postings, since they do no forward attachments nor carry binary groups (groups with attachments: pix, mp3 files etc.). If you don't care for the latter, it really is the ideal newsserver.

The only inconvenient I ever experienced on a rainy day I spent mostly in front of the PC: There is a standard maximum of 250 postings a day you can send (to avoid spammers). But even this figure was heightened without problem after a short mail exchange

- and this within minutes.

M.

] Mark Lipton wrote: ] ] > Another good solution is to sign up for the free service ] > available from news.uni-berlin.de: ] > ] >

] ] I'd strongly support this solution - far superior to groups.google ] imnsho -, using it myself for years: It's free, it's well ] serviced, it's fast, and it has quite a long holding time of ] postings, since they do no forward attachments nor carry binary ] groups (groups with attachments: pix, mp3 files etc.). If you ] don't care for the latter, it really is the ideal newsserver.

Agreed, this is an excellent server. I've been using it for awhile (following M. Pronay's suggestion) and have rarely noticed a dropped post. Not much spam shows up, either. Highly recommended.

-E