hdante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How can I access Usenet without using Google Groups ? (my ISP doesn't > have a NNTP server). Do you recommend doing so ?
Yes, even those ISP's who do have a news server often seem to make a mess of maintaining it. I use news.individual.net which seems to do a pretty good job of filtering out spam messages (or at least I see a lot more messages complaining about spam messages than spam messages themselves). Also, it is a lot cheaper than most third party news servers: 10EUR per year for 25,000 newsgroups. See http://news.individual.net/ > What's your prefered news reader ? XNews, but that's mostly just because I'm used to it. It is getting a bit elderly these days and doesn't handle non-ascii encodings very well. It does have good scorefile support though. I use Hamster to actually retrieve news: Hamster runs as a local newsserver and pulls feeds from as many different news servers as I want to configure presenting them all as though they come from the same server. That means I can use my ISPs server as a backup in case I can't access news.individual.net for any reason (my previous ISP kept 'accidentally' throttling usenet access): Hamster just merges the newsfeeds together and is intelligent enough not to fetch a message twice from different servers. I also recommend Gmane which provides a free news server for most mailing lists: mailing lists are a lot more manageable when gatewayed into a news server. If you just want to access comp.lang.python I think you'll find the mailing list to which it is connected is available for free on Gmane. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
