Reading Netnews at Idiom

Idiom's news server

Idiom uses a caching news server as a front end to 3rd-party news servers. This improves the performance compared to accessing the servers directly and allows us to combine sources of news.

The main 3rd-party server is provided by Supernews. Supernews is a news outsourcing service. Their entire business is news. They carry nearly all groups. Their service can only be accessed for free when directly connected to the Internet through Idiom. Set your news server to news3.idiom.com" to access this server.

Reading netnews from the unix shell

There are four news readers supported: trn, tin, pine, and nn. Of the four, trn is the most powerful, tin is the prettiest, and pine is the simplest.

Reading netnews from your home system

If you connect through PPP, then you can read news using a reader on your local system.

Connect to news.idiom.com.

Reading netnews via the web

If you want to read netnews via the web, Google Groups provides a news->web gateway.

Google Groups does not carry the idiom-specific newsgroups that are available through Idiom's news server.

To read Google Groups, click here.


Search Discussion Groups For:

Local newsgroups

If you want more local newsgroups made, just ask.
• idiom.announce
  Announcements of new features, downtime, anything official.

• idiom.introductions
  Introduce yourself to your fellow users.

• idiom.help
  If you've got a support question, it's likely that someone else would be interested in the answer too. Please post your questions rather than email them.

• idiom.ppp
  PPP is tricky. Discuss it here.

• idiom.test
  Test your news software with this group.

Gatewayed mailing lists

There are hundreds of mailing lists gatewayed into local news groups. They show up as mgate.*. If you wish to have a mailing list added, send mail to support@idiom.com with the full details of how to subscribe.