[insert your title here]

Bad tools make what is normally an easy job, far too much extra work. Good tools make your life all that much simpler.
Get the right tools for the right job and stop missing out on what your present software can't handle. Most of the downloading tips and tricks in this FAQ refer to Agent because that's the newsreader chosen by most experienced Usenet users. If you're on a Mac or have another Windows reader you prefer, the underlying principles can often be adapted to your software. But first, here's what we know about some newsreaders to help you choose.

Forté Agent would appear to be the best off-line reading, kill and watch filters, full in/out email, configurable for multiple servers or users, automatic MIME and UUdecoding, joined retrieval of headers for multipart, ... you get the drift. A FAQ and help with Agent can be found in alt.usenet.offline-reader.forte-agent.

XNews: According to some, XNews works better than NewsExpress in the Win98 environment, mainly because NewsExpress is a 16 bit proggie and Xnews is 32 bit. It has lots of great features and is very intuitive, as far as being easy to figure out. I've been using it for about a year and its worked very well for me. Your mileage may vary... I believe it's available for free at the Tucows website, along with a lot of other great Win95/98 software.

Micro Planet Gravity: According to some, this program has gone from $39us to free. While I've read the detailed post on a website about it being free, I've yet to see anything of the Micro Planet site.

Yet Another NewsWatcher appears to be the best/most popular newsreader on the Macintosh platform, with Multi-Threaded (MT) NewsWatcher being next. The Mac links section offers a beginners guide to learning NewsWatcher (again, in all it's variants). This link offers a pretty extensive description and utilities list for YA (Yet Another)-NewsWatcher.

If you have just a basic knowledge of Unix shell commands, Usenet access is very straightforward. From the shell prompt, just launch your news reader of choice (more about this later), subscribe to the desired groups, and start reading. It's that simple. But the more you know about Unix operations, the more sophisticated your news reading can become (more on this later, too).

So which news reader? A very good question. Unix newsreaders come in several varieties. Most Unix neophytes cut their eyeteeth with Tin, a very straight forward, menu driven newsreader. But you'll find Tin to be a tremendous resource hog on you Linux box and its binary decoding capability is limited (articles must be individually tagged in order). But it does have support for multiple news servers and authentication (these are a *must* these days for any newsreader).

The champion news reader seems to be Trn (threaded read news). It offers sophisticated news group navigation and filtration options (the filter capability alone is worth the price of admission), multiple news server and authentication support, robust and clever binary decoding (both UU encoding and MIME... by the way, the UU means Unix to Unix), article scoring, mouse-in-xterm support (if you really have a strong desire for rodent-clutching), and a host of other features too numerous to mention here.

Other noteworthy readers are nn, slrn, gnus, and xnews. All have differing of user friendliness and capability. My advice would be to spend some time trying them out and make your own decision. I almost forgot to mention that *all* of the above newsreaders come with complete source code. You can tweak and customize as you see fit. For Linux users, all the major distributions (Slackware, Red Hat, Debian, SuSe) will allow you to install one or more of these right out of the box!

Offline newsreading and decoding? Not a problem. One popular program is suck. Just specify the newsgroup, and it makes the NNRP connection and downloads all available articles (or any subset thereof) for the group. Once you have the articles, just run them through unpost (another fine utility, complete with source code) to get them decoded. Be advised, however, that many ISPs and news services have restrictions on running suck or pulling suck-type news feeds (yes, they'll be able to tell).

Despite the long line of development, these are poor choices for multipart binaries. The reader built into your web browser is a good example of an online reader. Same for AOL. There's nothing to see unless you're connected to a server. Agent and most of the others above are offline readers, which transfer information from the news server to data files on your hard drive. You can disconnect from the server and even disconnect your modem, and still be able to read the headers and all the posts for which you've retrieved bodies.
Also, offline readers keep track of which posts you've already seen, so you only have to get new headers when you log in again, not all headers.

Outlook Express

Truly NOT recommended as a newsreader, but here's some help on how to download and assemble the files.

Check out the visual walkthrough submitted by Daddio for a quick example of how to use OE to combine multi-part file postings.

1. Are you using the Preview pane layout?? If not, then Click on VIEW | Layout, then select to use the Preview showing them below message headers.

2. Next, access the Newsgroup you want to get the messages from. Depending upon your TOOLS | OPTIONS | READ, Settings, where you can have it set to get up to 1,000 headers at a time, then when you first access the newsgroup, it will download that many headers. Use the Tools | Get ### headers choice until you get all of the available headers, or at least a few thousand.

3.Then make sure you have the headers set to SORT by SUBJECT so you can keep all of the parts together (click on Subject until the little arrow points up = Descending order), scroll thru the headers and find a file you want. Make sure ALL parts are there, like 01/29 thru 29/29.

4.Then, click on each subject header line. That will start OE to start downloading the BODIES that go with the headers. Be patient, you will see the little folded ICON in front of the header change to one with lines in it, that's how you can tell you've got the body downloaded.

5. Now, click on the first part 01/29, then scroll down to see the last part, and holding the SHIFT key down, click on the last part, to highlight all parts in-between, then right-click, select COMBINE and DECODE, then select OK (some software posts the parts labeled as 1/20 instead of 01/20,that can mess up the order that OE puts the pieces in, and you have to juggle them around), then double click on the file if you want to view it, or right click and select to save it and view it later!!!

6. Now, you don't have to baby-sit the OE program, you can select many different movies and all of their parts, let it download the bodies, even sign off, just come back to OE, the parts are now on your hard drive, select them and combine them at your leisure. You will want to review your preferences in the TOOLS | OPTIONS | MAINTENANCE section, you may want to set them to NOT delete the messages or bodies when you exit or shut down OE, that way if there was a partial post of pieces of a video, you can keep those parts in OE, then get back on line later, access the next batch of headers and perhaps find the missing parts, then combine them. Now, after you have accessed a newsgroup, found all the movies you wanted, you will want to do some Maintenance to clear out the OE cache of headers for your newsgroup since it may NOT automatically delete them according to your preferences settings, so again, TOOLS | OPTIONS | Maintenance, then select CLEAN UP Now, then browse to your specific newsgroup, select it, then when it comes back to the next screen, select to DELETE messages and bodies. You may also want to select CATCHUP if there are like 30,000 messages in a newsgroup according to the info bar at the bottom stating how many messages to download, vs. read, etc.

Good Luck and happy downloading.

Newsreaders