Free Newsgroup servers

Factual Questions
1

I usually browse newgroups through groups.google.com – but you can’t look at pictures or see attached files, etc.

Are there any free newsgroup servers out there so I can look through alt.bin and the like?

2

Though they don’t tend to advertise it, many (most?) ISPs have their own news servers for their customers. Try pointing your news browser to news.<your ISP> (for instance, if your email address were remisser@foo.bar, you’d point your news browser to news.foo.bar) and using the same login as your email.

3

Oh, I forgot to mention it explicitly, but you’ll need a newsreader, since your ISP won’t likely have a web-based news feed. Forté has a free newsreader (Agent). It starts as the full version, but then expires to the free version after 30 days if you don’t feel like paying for it. Another good free newsreader is xnews.

4

A very little bit of searching and prodding beginning with Google got me more free news servers than I can handle (hint: ‘free news server binaries’, no quotes), many with binaries.

But the fastest is, of course, to try your local ISP’s server.

Oh, and as for newsreaders, I love Pan. Though the webpage’s title says Pan is for GNOME, there are builds for MacOS and Windows. Pan is a very good usenet client; read the feature list for details. Plus, it’s free.

(Also, the Mozilla browser comes with its own newsreader, lately spun off into Thunderbird. (Perfect for when you want to grab a fo’ty and ripple through the groups. ;)))

5

Try these links. Don’t expect too much though. When you find a free news server that has binaries groups they’re either S-L-O-W or full of incomplete posts. Sometimes you get lucky though.

http://ecalame.tripod.com/free.html

http://www.newzbot.com/serverlist.php?since=ALL&orderby=groupcount&sortorder=desc&show_maxgroup=on&show_post=on&show_kps=on&show_retention=on

6

this is a free web-based newserver http://groupsearch.news-xxl.net/ (contains some rude binary groups too). However it cannot decode Y-encoded files but does handle normal jpegs. It should be possible to cut and paste the Y-encoded file into a text editor and decode with a decoder, but I cant be bothered. I haven’t been able to connect to it for a few days - hope it isnt down permanently.

7

Any free newsgroup servers are going to suck for binary attachments. If you like the binaries and your ISP doesn’t provide free Usenet access, look at something like Giganews. It’s as low as $7.99/mo for a 2GB plan. Their retention is 30+ days on most groups and I haven’t found an incomplete post - except for really old posts - in a year or two.

8

my free webserver seems to have transformed itself into a paysite now. Curses

9

apart from newsbot above, the best uptodate resources for free newsservers is http://freenews.maxbaud.net/ . Pulin http://home.snafu.de/hweede/pulin.htm often has some good free newsservers that are worth checking out