Kaiser Soze's Blog

Finding and using free usenetservers – The truth about ‘free’ servers

You’ve heard about them. The free newsgroup servers.  They do exist.  But they probably don’t have what you want. Who has them – Free newsgroup servers (supporting NNTP newsreaders like FreeAgent) typically fall into one of four categories:

• Someone left the barn door open. In this case, someone has set up a Usenet NNTP server, is getting feeds of articles from a peer or two, but has forgotten to put a password on the server.  So anyone who finds the address can just connect and download articles.  While this does happen from time to time, it’s pretty rare these days.  Anyone with a fat enough pipe and enough disk space to host a newsgroup server of any size also has some decent knowledge about what they’re doing, and leaving the barn door open is a mistake they are unlikely to make.  Further, as soon as an address is found and people start to connect, the host’s bandwidth gets so overwhelmed that they fix their mistake pretty darned quickly.  Anyone who isn’t overwhelmed in a few hours probably doesn’t have any newsgroups of interest (i.e. binary newsgroups). In a nutshell, open barn doors are rare, don’t last long, and typically don’t have any interesting groups.Face it, if you want the good stuff, you’re gonna end up paying for it.  Still, a good usenet service is much cheaper than a web site subscription and looks better on the credit card bill.
• Humanitarian causes. These servers are often hosted by universities or other not-for-profit organizations that want to foster free speech.  That’s what newsgroups were about in the first place, and these organizations aspire to continue that history.   However, free speech is about text messages here, not binaries.  You are very unlikely to find alt.binaries.nude.spongebob on one of these servers.
• Corporate servers. Many of the larger computer software and services companies run usenet servers dedicated to the newsgroups about their products.  There are hundreds of public newsgroups dedicated to products from Borland, Microsoft, IBM, and HP.  These newsgroups are typically available on all the ISP Usenet servers, but it is not uncommon for the corporation that makes the product to also host a free usenet server that carries just the newsgroups about its products.   Why would Microsoft host a bunch of servers about its own products when most ISP’s already host them too?  Because this allows them to archive activity much longer, years for some group.  A newsgroup discussion group is also a great self-help product support vehicle for many companies.  Also, because many of their clients (other companies) give their employees access to the Internet from work, but do not supply a newsgroup server for them.  This allows the employees in IT at XYZ Manufacturing to read the microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp newsgroup at work by connecting to an open server at Microsoft.
• ISP servers. In the Netherlands quite a lot of ISP’s offer limited usenet acces. I don’t know how this in other countries but you might want to check it out before you subscribe with a new ISP. These servers of course aren’t really free, because they come with your internet connection you still end up paying for. At least you don’t have to pay for them both. A big disadvantage of a lot of the free usenet servers in the Netherlands is that retention is low (2 to 8 days) and speeds are capped (~40 – ~100 kB/s).

Web-Based free services. There haven’t been found any free web-based usenet services that offer binaries.  But for text there is a new favorite: Mailgate.  It has about 3 months of message retention, and while it doesn’t include any of the alt.* groups, it’s much easier to read than Google Newsgroups.  The Google database is actually a continuation of the old DejaNews service, and goes back nearly 20 years.  The only thing to dislike about Google is that it’s hard to just browse a newsgroup – everything is search oriented, not browse oriented.

If you are still intent on trying to find and use a free newsgroup server, the following is a list of web pages that collect information about open servers.  Note, these sites come and go, as they must be updated almost daily when open servers are re-passworded.

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