Most Internet users don't use Newsgroups because they don't know what they are or how to access them. The reason for this is that they pre-date the World Wide Web and are a separate part of the Internet so accessing and using them is not simple like clicking on pretty web pages.

What is a Newsgroup? The name is misleading since it sounds like some sort of journalistic material, which it's not. In the early days of the Internet Newsgroups started out as discussion groups on various technical topics mostly by colleges and universities and were limited to text messages. It wasn't long before users thought it would be nice to share binary files with each but were stuck with the fact that only text could be sent. They solved the problem by coming up with a coding scheme to convert binary files to text and back to binary when received. Viola! Graphics could be sent. Next came animations and movies but a new problem existed. Most news servers won't accept messages longer than 10,000 lines and a 700 MB movie takes around 15 million lines. The solution was to break up the movie in segments and send then as parts 1, 2, 3, etc. The receiving end would then decode the text segments back to binary and combine them to create the original movie. That's what you see in Outlook Express when you click on Message/Combine and Decode.

A word about pornography: Some folks consider Newsgroups to be nothing more than a haven for pornography. It's true that lots of pornographic pictures and movies exist on Newsgroups and it's been estimated that more pornography is downloaded from them than the web. On the other hand, there are over 100,000 Newsgroup topics representing a vast source for information. It's another great place to look when searching for answers.

Let's now talk about accessing Newsgroups using Microsoft's Outlook Express. You can do the same with Netscape's mail program but if you only have Eudora mail you're out of luck. But hey, you can have more than one e-mail program.

Open Outlook Express and go to Tools/Accounts and click on the News tab. If no entry exists click on Add followed by News. Type a name and your e-mail address and you'll reach a display requesting that you enter your News (NNTP) server. You can ask your ISP what the address is but usually it's a format like news.always-online.com if your ISP happens to be Always Online. Click next, finish and close. You will be given an opportunity to download Newsgroups or you can do it later after you read below.

After you have a Newsgroup account you need to go online and get the complete list of groups that your ISP subscribes to. To do this open Outlook Express and go to Tools/Newsgroups. It will take awhile to download thousands of headers but finally you'll see a list of all the topics. You may either scroll down the list highlighting topics you want and clicking on subscribe or entering search words. For example you might search on "genealogy" to see all the groups with genealogy in the name.

After setting up a Newsgroup account and subscribing to a number of topics that interest you what next? In Outlook Express go where you see your inbox and outbox folders and below them you'll see the list of Newsgroups you subscribed to. Click on any one of them and it will open showing current messages. I hate to leave you hanging at this point but from here on you're pretty much on your own and will have to learn by experience. You may display messages, save them, reply or post messages. There are lots of graphics, animations and music on Newsgroups and you'll have to learn how to download them. For example, multimedia movies come in various formats and are posted as a set of many files. To download them you must highlight all the files of the set and click Message/Combine and Decode. It takes a long time to download animations and movies unless you have high speed. Also it should be mentioned that unless you have a player for the particular file format such as .mpg, .avi, .rar, etc., it would be a waste of time downloading the files. With a little Google research you can find players to download that will play the various formats.

If you really want to become a Newsgroup guru, which I'm not, I suggest reading "Slyck's Guide to the Newsgroups" at http://www.slyck.com/ng.php. Also I suggest you look into downloading a Newsgroup reader that allows you to download topics and browse through them offline in a more organized way. Go to www.google.com and enter "newsgroup reader" to find a free one.