Free Usenet News

Giganews has been providing Tier-1 NNTP service since the early 90's. They have always had good support and excellent service in my experience. I have been a member of their affiliate program from the beginning and have only received a couple of complaints in emails, out of the thousands of people that have purchased an account after visiting my site. Connecting to their servers from my home I get amazing active file download speeds using my testing software. It is not uncommon for active file transfers speeds to rival those of my personal news server sitting on the same rack as my test system.

Giganews Newsgroups

How to setup Giganews+MIMO News Reader

This guide is intended to help users set up and run a Usenet Newsgroup browser in as few steps as possible. It is really intended for new users, but might prove useful to some more experienced users as well. I will try to avoid getting too deep into the technical details, and more into the features and basic configuration of a modern NNTP browser.

The browser I have chosen to discuss today is called MIMO. MIMO is free to Diamond account users from Giganews, or it can be purchased separately. At this time it only works with a Giganews account and server. My intentions are that my instructions are generic enough that they can be used with any browser and service provider.

Getting Started

There are basically 2 or 3 things required for you to be able to begin downloading articles from a news server:

  1. A good newsgroup server - this is a computer located somewhere on the internet which has a large repository of articles, and is willing to give or sell you access to it's content.
  2. A newsgroup browser - a program that runs on your operating system and is able to access the articles on the newsgroup server
  3. Depending on your chosen browser, you may also need to use an indexing site to search for articles that you want to see.

Usenet Service Providers

The most important thing to do is choose a good Usenet service provider. Commercial access to servers typically runs from about $8-$35 per month, depending on features and if you want to pay monthly or yearly, etc. I have reviews for several of the commercial providers on my site, but for the purposes of this article I have decided to use Giganews. I have had many years of experience with Giganews and have never been disappointed, they have excellent performance and article retention, plus, if you need it, their support is great as well. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I get free accounts from several different providers, including Giganews.

Newsgroup Browser

There used to be many different free news readers, however, many of them have been abandoned by their authors and don't have any of the latest features, such as built in RAR, PAR, NZB and SVF support. Most commercial browsers have all those features and more, at a decent price. Since I am using Giganews for this guide, I will also use their browser, called MIMO.It is provided for free with a diamond account and has all the built in features I listed above, plus it has been optimized to use search features that tie directly in to the Giganews servers, eliminating the need for an indexing site.

Installing and Configuring your browser

Step 1 - Sign up with a service provider

For the purposes of this guide I chose Giganews, simply because they provide me with an account and a free browser. I know others don't have that luxury, so I would recommend that you look at my site Freenews to help you choose a service provider that you like and can afford. You can also choose one of the free servers that I list on my site, if you find one that carries a group that you want, but you should be aware that free servers typically do not carry binaries groups, however a free server can be an inexpensive way to configure your browser.

Step 2 - Download and install a browser

Once again, since I am using Giganews, I am also using their browser. It is called MIMO and you can download MIMO directly from Giganews. The browser is currently in active development and is considered Beta, but my experience has been that it is very stable. If you wish to use a different browser I would recommend looking on Wikipedia. Someone has spent a lot of time making a quite exhaustive list of newsreaders, their features, and where you can download them from.

Step 2a - download

Whatever browser you have chosen, you need to go to the website for that browser and click on the download button or link. Your browser will ask you to confirm that you want to save or run the file. I recommend that you save the file first, then manually virus scanner it, before you actually run the installation.

Step 2b - install

There are basically two kinds of installations; manual installations require that you decompress the installation file into a directory where you will be able to find and run your news browser. Automatic installations run on your operating system and automatically install the software in a directory and usually do nice things like create links on your desktop and add themselves to your start menu. If the browser you have chosen requires a manual decompress, I would recommend that you virus scan all the files again after the decompression is complete.

Step 3 - Configure

After you have finished installing your browser you will need to configure it. In the case of MIMO, basic configuration consists of typing in your username and password. Then you click the Test Connection button and if it verifies you click the Done button. Because MIMO only works with Giganews, there is nothing else required to setup your browser.

Typical browsers require a little more configuration to work, and you will need to find the "options" or "preferences" option in the applications menus. Usually the preferences are either in the "File" menu or the "Tools" menu. When you find the options, you want to find the place where you enter the Server settings. This should have, at the bare minimum, entries for a server name, port, username and password. All of this information should have been in an confirmation email from your chosen service provider. If you are trying free servers from my list you can usually leave the username and password blank. Also, the port is almost always 119.

Step 4 - Start browsing

If you have properly configured the settings above, you should now be able to start browsing on your server. With MIMO I was presented with a short list of default newsgroups. If there is not a default list, most browsers have a "Group List" in the menus which you can choose from. I would recommend that you use my search engine at freenews.maxbaud.net to find groups that have the content you are interested in. You can also visit an indexing site, like I mentioned above to search for articles you want which will tell you what groups you need to be in to find your articles.

Brian McCane has operated a Usenet server since 1987 and the first Usenet index web site since 1993. By visiting his website freenews.maxbaud.net you can learn more about "Giganews" and the MIMO browser.