this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Baffled by Usenet newsgroups [Solved] (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/usenet@lemmy.world
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[Solved thanks to @tal. See instructions below.]

I'd like to subscribe and occasionally post to some usenet newsgroup like sci.physics or sci.physics.research. It's difficult! I tried to simply enter "sci.physics" in Thunderbird's Newsgroup reader, but apparently it doesn't work simply like that... Even subscribing to news.eternal-september.org didn't help – I think my understanding of providers and groups is very confused.

Could anyone kindly help?

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[–] tal 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Two different things there.

  • There are news servers, like news.eternal-september.org.

  • There are newsgroups, like sci.physics.

Any news server may provide access to any newsgroups that they carry via NNTP. To do that, you'll need an account on the news server.

Once you have an account on that news server, you can subscribe to newsgroups there.

These days, most Usenet servers are, I think, commercial access, though news.eternal-september.org apparently provides free accounts with registration there:

https://news.eternal-september.org/

news.eternal-september.org provides free read and write access to all text newsgroups. It requires a registration that can be done online.

For newsreader software (which I assume Thunderbird can do; I know it as an email client) there'll be a way to plug in your NNTP server, account name, and password in your settings. Once that's working, you should be able to obtain and view a list of newsgroups that the news server provides.

There is no real concept of "subscription" to a newsgroup at an NNTP level in the sense that you subscribe to a community here on the Threadiverse. Some newsreader software packages will let you specify a list of newsgroups for which you download the entire contents of a newsgroup from a news server to your local computer so that you can read them when you're not connected to the Internet. These are typically called "offline" newsreaders. They might choose to call that a "subscription". Not all newsreader software packages support this mode of operation.

A newsreader software package may also have a list of "favorite" newsgroups for quick access, and might call that a "subscription".

But normally (outside some unusual Usenet server software packages like LeafNode, if that's still around, that have a caching, fetch-on-demand mode of operation), a Usenet server has a fixed set of newsgroups (which may not be a full list of all of the newsgroups out there; it looks like news.eternal-september.org doesn't carry alt.binaries newsgroups, which are very bandwidth-heavy) and receives all of the posts to those newsgroups. End users don't ask the news server to start receiving posts to a newsgroup via subscription, don't affect what the news server receives the way they do instances here on the Threadiverse. You can browse any newsgroup that you have access to on the news server without a subscription.

[–] pglpm@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Fantastic explanation, thank you! Now I understand the difference between "server" and "group". I finally managed to subscribe now.

For anyone in my same position:

  • Create an account on news.eternal-september.org
  • Add that newsgroup on Thunderbird (Accounts panel, add new account, and so on)
  • It's important to tick "Always request authentication" on the Server Settings for that newsgroup account
  • Then you can right-click on that account in the folder list and choose "Subscribe". You'll be asked for your eternal-september username and password.
  • The subscription window has a search function to search for the newsgroup you want to subscribe to.

Done!

Thanks @tal again very much!

[–] tal 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Looking at several of the newsreader software packages that do have offline support, it looks like "subscription" is typically used to refer to that simple action of adding a newsgroup to a list of "favorite newsgroups" for quick access.

It sounds like Thunderbird is not an offline reader. Apparently it supports a limited form of marking a group for offline use, and that groups are explicitly marked for such download via a second mechanism, not subscription:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=693668

Are the newsgroups set up for offline storage?

That would be the "select newsgroups for offline use..." button on attachment 566469 [details] ?

However, this does not download the bodies of posts in such a newsgroup, just the headers. These will include the title of the post, the author, and some other information about it, and I suppose might let you see a list of posts in a newsgroup, but won't let you read posts in a newsgroup offline, which is normally how a newsreader software package with offline reading support works.

It sounds like the real problem is that we don't automatically download bodies for offline retention in newsgroups, which I don't think we've ever supported, but which I think is worthwhile to support.

Yes, "Select this newsgroup for offline use" might be misleading, as it does not mean that bodies will be saved as well when new headers are fetched.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 day ago

I vaguely recall in the 90's that email clients had offline reading for newsgroups, since the pattern with dialup was connect-grab everything-disconnect.

But that was a long time ago, and I wouldn't trust my memory too much. Maybe I had an offline reader app.

[–] Zachariah@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

top tier comment

[–] donio@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Since you are asking on Lemmy: "provider" or "news server" is like the Lemmy instance and "newsgroup" is like the Lemmy community except it's a shared namespace across all servers that carry the group so sci.physics is sci.physics everywhere.

[–] pglpm@lemmy.ca 1 points 23 hours ago

That's a useful analogy, cheers!

[–] thisusernameistaken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Eternal September is limited on retention for the groups they carry. Should you find that you want to go back for historical discussion or nostalgia you can pay a bit for a commercial server to get posts going back many years. block accounts (set amount of data) will be fine as it will take forever to use up gigabytes with only text posts. 5 gigs or less is fine and usually only cost a few bucks. Blocknews.net has 5 for $2.

[–] pglpm@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you for the heads-up, it is quite cheap indeed. I noticed that some of the newsgroups unfortunately have much spam, so I'll see if I'm really interested in subscribing. But some are moderated, luckily.

[–] thisusernameistaken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

yes lots of spam but hopefully if more people use them discussion will come back and spam will stop.