Saurabh Gupta,

A: You can read and post Usenet messages for free using your Web browser at Deja.com and RemarQ.com, but like Web-based e-mail, the messages stay on the server, not on your computer. And forget about using your favourite newsreader program to grab or block out specific messages. The good news: There are hundreds of free news servers out there. The bad news: As usual, you get what you pay for. They're often bogged down, they may not be around tomorrow, and they may not carry the groups you're looking for.

There's no single best place to begin a search for free servers, but as good a place to start as any is usenet.startshere.net. It claims to have a database of 5785 news servers, of which 574 are open to the public.

You can also check the many lists of favourite servers that are maintained by free-news fans. To find these sites, just browse over to your favourite search engine and enter free news server in the search box. And don't forget to check in with the source itself: Usenet's own alt.free.newsservers group.

If you're like me, you'll soon tire of entering addresses for slow or expired servers into your newsreader. But you can pay for better news server access. Because Usenet generates gigabytes of traffic each day, smaller ISPs often farm their Usenet service out to a large commercial NNTP news service such as Supernews (supernews.com) or Giganews (giganews.com). Both these companies also sell individual Usenet accounts at rates ranging from $US12 to $US60 a month, depending on your connection speed and/or how much raw data you plan to retrieve.

Many companies maintain free public newsgroup servers that may have information you want. They just don't carry the Usenet groups. You can access these servers by creating a new account in your newsreader software. To add Microsoft's news server to Netscape's Messenger, for example, choose EditòPreferences, select Newsgroup Servers under Mail & Newsgroups, click the Add button, enter msnews.microsoft.com in the server field, and click OK (see FIGURE 1). If you want to add the Justice Department's news server, you're on your own.

Scott Spanbauer