Chapter 23: E-Mail and Newsgroups Using Outlook Express

What Are Newsgroups?

Newsgroups provide another way for you to use your computer and the Internet to communicate with the outside world. Unlike e-mail, however, a newsgroup is a public medium. When you send a message to a newsgroup, the message is available to anyone who wants to look at it--it's as if you have tacked up a notice on a public bulletin board. You never know who--if anyone--reads your message. The Internet-based system of newsgroups is called Usenet.

Newsgroups are organized by topic. Because there are tens of thousands of newsgroups, topics can be very specific. When you have something to say about the topic of a newsgroup, you can use a newsreading program, such as Outlook Express, to compose a message (which may be many pages or only one line) and send it to your news server, a computer on the Internet that supports NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol), which makes your message available to other news servers. People who want to read the recent contributions to this newsgroup (including your message) can use a newsreading program (not necessarily the same as yours) to download messages from their own news servers.