Re: Google Groups On 10 Day Countdown

All the free providers seem gone, but I'm reasonably happy with

Works fine with thunderbird, but you have to use their free newsreading program if you want more search capability than thunderbird provides. Searches are definitely oriented towards binaries but text groups work ok.

I get can't find site for aioe, but eternal-september.org looks like it's still there. I should have said that I wanted binary access and that's not been free for a long time, sigh . Sorry.

frugalusenet.com is very basic but the price is very reasonable, has worked well for me for many years!

is free - he has a guilt-ware paypal button that I've used mind you...

John :-#)#

[May be a repeat, didn't see it come through yesterday.] I get can't find site for aioe, but eternal-september is still there. I should have said that I wanted binary access and that's not been free for a long time, sigh 🙂. Sorry.

Astraweb is pretty nearly free, and has binaries.

Cheers

Astraweb looks good, and is about 40% cheaper than newshosting ($8 vs $13/month). However, using newshosting's free newsreader you can do searches of their entire archive. I don't see any way to do that with astraweb with thunderbird. With thunderbird you have to download all the headers as far back as you want to search, and then search, and it slows to a crawl handling more than say 20,000 headers at a time. Then you have to give up a lot of disk space to keep those headers around, or spend many minutes deleting them just so you can download them the next time you want to do a search 🙂. I used to use newsguy which was very good and cheap, but they went under several years ago. At that time newshosting was the best I could find, but if I'd seen astraweb it would have been a hard choice. Yeah, I know I could use google groups to do searches but my google-fu is very weak there and I never seem to get anything useful.

Their nonrecurring plans ($x per GB) are pretty cheap. I paid them $40 or so, once, for enough downloaded data to last me till about 2550 AD.

I can't actually post on Astraweb from Seamonkey for some reason.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I've been having similar problems with Supernews. I've been using Supernews almost since they were founded about 30 years ago. My requirements are minimal (about 12 newsgroups) and no binary groups. Service has been generally good and reliable until about 3 months ago, when things began to deteriorate.

In the past, SED was collecting large amount of spam that I had to remove manually. Other groups with less traffic had less spam. A dialog with tech support was mostly useless boiler plate and promise to fix things I never mentioned. I gave up and eventually the spam problem was reduced, but not eliminated.

A few days ago, I noticed that there were a growing number of missing messages with followups. The missing messages were consistently on Google Groups, but not on the Supernews servers. Several of my own postings failed to appear on Supernews, but did appear on Google Groups. I sent another support request, which resulted in another boiler plate reply which mentioned that they are working on the spam problem, which was not was not my complaint. I suspect someone had looked up my previous support messages and intentionally ignored my complaint.

Joerg posted a recommendation to try individual.net. 10 euros per year and they accept Paypal payment. I tested it for a day. About

200 formerly missing messages magically arrived. My conclusion is that the missing messages problem is likely within the Supernews system. With only 1 weeks of experience with individual.net, I don't think I'm qualified for offering a recommendation quite yet. As long as Google maintains the Google Groups archives, which go back to about 1984, the >1000 day retention at individual.net is more than adequate:

Checking traceroute to news.individual.net from California:

my traffic goes from the US west coast to: New York -> Sweden -> Netherlands -> Germany About 160 msec latency.

I've been with <news.individual.net> over 20 years and always found them excellent. The MacSOUP newsreader has a good killfile system that removes most of the spam and had an excellent 'London Underground' map display of posts, so you know who is replying to whom.

If you buy a block data plan data it's even cheaper.