E-mail has two distinct advantages over regular mail. The most obvious is speed. Instead of several days, your message can reach the other side of the world in hours, minutes or even seconds (depending on where you drop off your mail and the state of the connections between there and your recipient). The other advantage is that once you master the basics, you'll be able to use e-mail to access databases and file libraries.

E-mail also has advantages over the telephone. You send your message when it's convenient for you. Your recipients respond at their convenience. No more telephone tag.

E-mail is your connection to help -- your Net lifeline. The Net can sometimes seem a frustrating place! No matter how hard you try, no matter where you look, you just might not be able to find the answer to whatever is causing your problems. But when you know how to use e-mail, help is often just a few keystrokes away: you can ask your system administrator or a friend for help in an e-mail message.

a- USENET Newsgroups:

Unlike e-mail, which is usually "one-to-one," Usenet is "many-to-many." Usenet is the international meeting place, where people gather to meet their friends, discuss the day's events, keep up with computer trends or talk about whatever is on their mind. To many people, Usenet is the Net. In fact, it is often confused with the Internet. But it is a totally separate system. All Internet sites can carry Usenet, but so do many non-Internet sites, from sophisticated Unix machines to old XT clones and Apple IIs.

Newsgroups, which are also known as bulletin boards, work similarly to electronic mail. However, instead of writing messages to individual users, participants in a newsgroup post their messages to a news server. Messages posted to newsgroups are called articles. In order to be able to read/post articles to a bulletin board (newsgroup) one needs to have a client software programs which is called news reader. Some web browsers such as Netscape or Internet Explorer have news reader programs built in. Other client programs are trn and pine.

Technically, Usenet messages are shipped around the world, from host system to host system, using one of several specific Net protocols. Your host system stores all of its Usenet messages in one place, which everybody with an account on the system can access. That way, no matter how many people actually read a given message, each host system has to store only one copy of it. Many host systems "talk" with several others regularly in case one or another of their links goes down for some reason. When two host systems connect, they basically compare notes on which Usenet messages they already have. Any that one is missing the other then transmits, and vice-versa. Because they are computers, they don't mind running through thousands, even millions, of these comparisons every day.

The basic building block of Usenet is the newsgroup, which is a collection of messages with a related theme (on other networks, these would be called conferences, forums, boards or special-interest groups). There are now more than 5,000 of these newsgroups, in several different languages, covering everything from art to zoology, from science fiction to South Africa. Some newsgroups are moderated. That means that any message sent to the list is read by the moderater first, and then if it is appropriate to the group, it is posted.

Newsgroup names start with one of a series of broad topic names. For example, newsgroups beginning with "comp." are about particular computer-related topics. These broad topics are followed by a series of more focused topics (so that comp.unix groups are limited to discussion about Unix).

The main hierarchies are:

Usenet History: In the late 1970s, Unix developers came up with a new feature: a system to allow Unix computers to exchange data over phone lines. In 1979, two graduate students at Duke University in North Carolina, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using this system, known as UUCP (for Unix-to-Unix CoPy), to distribute information of interest to people in the Unix community. Along with Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina and Steve Daniel, they wrote conferencing software and linked together computers at Duke and UNC. Word quickly spread and by 1981, a graduate student at Berkeley, Mark Horton and a nearby high school student, Matt Glickman, had released a new version that added more features and was able to handle larger volumes of postings -- the original North Carolina program was meant for only a few articles in a newsgroup each day.

Information about new groups Subscribe to: news.announce.newsgroups

b- Discussion Lists (a.k.a. Discussion Groups, Mailing Lists)

Usenet is not the only forum on the Net. Scores of "mailing lists, discussion groups, or lists" represent another way to interact with other Net users. Unlike Usenet messages, which are stored in one central location on your host system's computer, mailing-list messages are delivered right to your e-mail box, unlike Usenet messages.

You may have to ask for permission to join a mailing list. Unlike Usenet, where your message is distributed to the world, on a mailing list, you send your messages to a listserv machine (or a central moderator if the list is a moderated list) which distributes it to the other people on the list.

Many Bitnet discussion groups are now "translated" into Usenet form and carried through Usenet in the bit.listserv.* hierarchy. In general, it is probably better to read messages through Usenet if you can. It saves some storage space on your host system's hard drives. If 50 people subscribe to the same Bitnet list, that means 50 copies of each message get stored on the system; whereas if 50 people read a Usenet message, that is still only one message that needs storage on the system. It can also save your sanity if the discussion group generates large numbers of messages. Think of opening your e-mailbox one day to find 200 messages in it -- 199 of them from a discussion group and one of them a "real" e-mail message that's important to you. Subscribing and canceling subscriptions is done through an e-mail message to the listserver computer.

Last Updated: June 1, 1997