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Getting Started with Newsgroups

When you know how to an email program, you know 90 percent of what you need to know to use newsgroups. Reading a message, composing a new message, and replying are all very similar in an email program and a newsreader.

Where a newsreader differs is that it retrieves messages from and posts messages to Internet newsgroups, sometimes known as discussion groups or, collectively, as Usenet. The newsgroups and their messages are stored on a family of servers called news servers or NNTP servers.

Sending a message to a newsgroup is known as posting, because you're publishing the message in a public forum, just as if you ...