2nd April 2002

You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to unravel the mysteries of the URL. They don't just point to Web pages, ya know. Gopher resources, Telnet locations, Mailto links - all rely on the proper formatting of the pointer. And what about newsgroup messages? Yeah, those virtual bulletin boards can be accessed quickly as long as you have some kind of NNTP client (like Outlook Express) installed and registered. The easiest way to check is to open up your Internet Options Control Panel applet, flip to the Programs tab, and see which application is registered for Newsgroups. Now, Web pages are referenced with HTTP, FTP servers are referenced with FTP (of all things), and News servers are referenced with NEWS. Well, what if you want to point someone to a particular message that's sitting on a particular server? Simple dimple: "news colon forward-slash forward-slash [news server] forward-slash [Message-ID]" (sans quotes). How do you know what the Message-ID is? In Outlook Express, you can right-click on the message, select Properties, flip to the Details tab, and find it in there. It's in the message header. Remember not to include the greater-than / less-than symbols.