Posting to Newsgroups
by Dave Gollinger
Normally, if you're posting to a newsgroup from WebTV, you either
use Post or Respond from Discuss. To find Discuss, go to your (Webtv) homepage, click on Community on the side bar, click on "Discuss". You now have access to all usernet news groups that webtv provides access to. There are hundreds of other newsgroups which cannont be accessed through Webtv`s "Discuss" port, of which you may access through an alternative gateway such as deja news. You can also submit posts to
newsgroups from e-mail. There are several reasons you might want
to do this:
- You can forward things you have in e-mail to the newsgroup.
- You can forward a post from one newsgroup to another (while
viewing a post, hit Send, write the post you want to have appear
above the forwarded post, and send it to the other group).
- You can keep a copy of the post you submit this way (after
you post through mail, click Storage, click Sent, and Save the
sent copy to Saved mail).
- You can post from any e-mail account you have, including
Hotmail, Mailexcite, Yahoo, GeoCities, etc.
- You can use your Cut and paste feature to copy the content of your first E mail and you will only have to edit the group name on subsequent e-mails which you will post through mail2news. This is a real time saver!
If you're only interested in posting from a non-WebTV e-mail account, you may be
better off registering and posting through Deja News; to do so, click here.
How It Works
There are several e-mail–to–news gateways on the Internet, the
one I'm going to describe is at MIT in Massachusetts. When the
address you send to receives an e-mail, it reads the address and
follows the information you supply to direct the message to a
newsgroup as a post. This is the format of the address:
mail2news-YYYYMMDD-groupname@anon.lcs.mit.edu
YYYYMMDD is the date you're submitting the post,
if the current date is October 21, 1998, this part of the e-mail
address would be 19981021.
groupname is the name of the Usenet group you're
posting to, for instance alt.collecting.beaniebabies or
alt.discuss.beaniebabies.buy.sell.trade.
Things to Consider when using Mail2News
When posting to any Usenet newsgroup with a post not conducive with the Group Topic, i recommend that you put "OT" in your header to let the group members know your post is Off Topic thus allowing them the opportunity to bypass it. Remember though, Off Topic post are considered a violation of group charters, Usernet rules and most Server`s "Terms of Service". If you receive a warning from your ISP you should take it seriously as your account could be suspended or canceled for not adhering to, or heeding their instructions to discontinue such postings. Violations of Webtv`s TOS will also subject you to possible fines if your account is canceled and you wish to reactivate. Not to discourage you from posting, the upside to this is that webtv is very neglegent in addressing OT posting violations if such post do not represent a liability to them due to content. I recommend using an E mail account such as the ones noted above for your OT postings to advoid this problem. There are several free online E mail services you can use.
If you have any questions regarding any of the information provided herein, feel free to E me at supG@webtv.net