News reader servers can be assessed under the following categories:
Free (to you) - usually hosted by your ISP,
Retention may be a matter of 4, or fewer days,
Completeness of the message sets may also be lacking
real fun to have a conversation when you don't know how many of the
messages are missing,
Slow posting taking hours/days to get onto the server for others to see
May only carry a very limited selection of the available groups
Expensive - known as Premium news servers
Retention usually 4 or more weeks,
Completeness of the message sets rarely a problem
Slow posting rarely a problem except for messages posted via the 'Free'
servers
Most carry all the available groups
High quality and speed links to the web so your 8Mb link may run at near
that speed
And - those who:
May not hold stuff quite so long
May not hold all groups
May not be able to download to you at 8Mb
May suffer from slight delays in posting
Then you can pay by volume downloaded in a day/month
or by volume downloaded as you want
If you have access to a free facility, you may also want to pay for a
non-time limited 20Gb (or more or less) allocation to use for 'fills' -
just get headers from that one when you suspect your free one is not working
as required
and then just get the messages missing from your free service
Before you start though,
how fast is your link?
how much space do you have on your system - 4 weeks headers for a small
selection of volatile groups can be several gigabytes
and remember OE (and other readers) drop headers from the list you see when
they are dropped from the server
So, if you download lots of messages, and don't move them out of the readers
keeping, they'll be deleted from your drive by the reader when they are
dropped by the server.
JimB
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Mattingly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, August 05, 2006 6:53 PM
Subject: Re: Agent Newsreader
> Just a quick note that I have read, since
> writing the few lines below, that it isn't
> as easy as I thought with some isp's.
> That is to say, some isp's won't let
> you use an outside newsgroup server.
> All the ISP's which I have had have
> allowed me to do so.
>
> Gary
--
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