Usenet Fundamentals
The Basics of Newsgroups

Usenet is world wide network for sharing messages with Internet users everywhere.
A message posted using the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) will be published to its assigned Usenet newsgroup where other users with similar interests are able to view it and reply.

Since its early days in the 1980s, Usenet has been a powerful collaboration tool. Early discussions on Usenet helped shaped the Internet as we know it today. Technologies such as the World Wide Web and GNU/Linux were announced, discussed, and shaped by discussions on Usenet. Concepts that we now take for granted like the “FAQ”, and “spam”, have their roots in early Usenet posts.

At its core Usenet is a giant archive of e-mail like messages called “articles”. These articles are categorized by subject into newsgroups. This collection of newsgroups and articles is generally referred to as “news”.
Usenet news is distributed among a global, constantly changing, network of news servers and news service providers. This constant feeding of new news articles between servers makes Usenet a powerful and robust communication platform.

All you need to participate in Usenet is access to a news service, such as UsenetExpress, and a news client. A news client is software that runs on your computer. It allows you to browse the Usenet newsgroups, read and download messages, and also post messages of your own. There are many different news clients designed to work on every platform available and suited to different tastes and needs. We have some guides available that show you some of the more popular news clients.

Our support section also has lots of other information about our Usenet service and how to get started with Usenet.