Usenet @ RKM

Adding a news server
To add a news server, go to the configuration menu and select the "create
new account" option. There you can name the news-account to anything of your
liking. This is important, so you can identify the account later.

In the BASIC tab, in the block 'personal information' you also can enter
your own name, your e-mail address (so you can reply to news message by
e-mail), optionally your organization (if you are organized at all).

In the block 'Server information' you select the "News (NNTP)" protocol.
Forget about "Inbox", that does not matter in this setup. Next you enter the
name of the newsserver you want to connect to. You can get that name from
your ISP, if you don't already have that.

If you need to log into the news server, check the box next to "This server
requires authentication", and then fill the fields for User ID and Password.

Next step is to go to the Send tab. Since Receive is only there for e-mail,
there is no need to do anything there. You can't even do anything in the
Receive tab, for that matter. So, in Send you can select a few options:

a.. If you want a date header field added to posts
b.. If Sylpheed should generate a Message-ID
c.. If you want to add user-defined headers
The next items only apply to when you reply to a news message through
e-mail. You can set an automatic CC, BCC or Reply-To address here. In case
your ISP requires SMTP authentication, you can select the checkbox here
below.
The next tab, Compose, allows you to select a default signature file. This
will be added to each post to the newsgroups you do.

Finally, in the "Advanced" tab, you can specify the port on which Sylpheed
has to connect to the news server. The default is 119, and only in rare
cases you should have to do something about that.

Now you click "OK" and the account is created! You can verify this by
checking the folder pane in Sylpheed. There you will see a new folder
created with the name of the account you entered, and (news) behind it.

Deleting a news-server.
If you want to delete a news-account, right-click the news-folder and select
"Remove news account". After confirming that you want this to be done, the
account and all files related will be removed.

16.2 Subscribing and Unsubscribing to NewsGroups
Okay. Here the real stuff begins. First you have to let Sylpheed load the
list of news groups that is on the news system. Right-click the new NEWS
folder and select "Subscribe to newsgroups". Sylpheed will tell you that the
groups need to be downloaded, so sit back and wait a while. Of course,
during time, new groups are added, and dead groups are removed. For this you
can click the "refresh" button in the newsgroup dialog, so a new list is
downloaded and you are up to date

After a while the groups are loaded and displayed in a window. Now you can
look up a group that is interesting, for example comp.os.linux.networking.
Click the name once and then select OK. The group will be added to the news
folder as a subfolder. When you now click the name of the new subfolder,
Sylpheed will connect to the news server and download the headers (subject
lines, in e-mail talk), to your computer. Some groups have -large- amounts
of articles, so this may take a while!!

16.3 Reading News
When the articles are displayed, in the summary view, you can click one of
them to be downloaded so you can read it. This will usually go very quickly
on discussion groups.

If you want to respond to a message, press Alt-R (or press "Reply") and a
message window will pop up, with the name of the newsgroup already in the
"To" field. Depending on whether or not you selected quoting of the message,
the original message will be in the body of the message already. Write away,
then send, and soon the entire world will be able to read what you wrote on
the subject.

Starting a new message in a newsgroup is equally simple: press Alt-N (or
click "New"), the name of the newsgroup is in the "To" field, and you can
write your question or reply.

A note about binary files
In newsgroups you can download binary files. These are programs, images etc.
Often these are posted as so called UUencoded files. Sylpheed will as upto
version 0.5.1 not decode UUencoded files. You need to save these articles to
disk as separate files, and use a separate decoder program, like juju, to
decode the garble of text. A UUencoded file usually looks something like
this:

begin 666 sundown.jpg

after which you will find nicely formatted blocks of characters that don't
seem to mean anything.