(Pseudo) Anonymous Posting to Usenet
The method described here allows you to send psuedo-anonymous Usenet posts via Mail2News gateways from almost any NNTP news client. See the Overview - How it Works section for details on the difference between anonymous posting and psedu-anonymous.
This information is provided for the benefit of those who have had their posting privileges revoked by their ISP or news provider for expressing controversial opinions or for being engaged in flame wars with other posters. Mail2News gateways are provided free of charge by people who give their own time, money and resources to keep the gateways running, protect your privacy and your right to post your opinions. Do not spam them. Do not flood them. And do not post binaries, pictures, or warez.
If you follow these instructions you will have setup your own high-speed news server on your PC. It is beyond the scope of this article to troubleshoot any issues you may encounter. Please be prepared to troubleshoot and especially be prepared to read the manuals and help text for the software you will be using.
These instructions have been tested mutliple times and independently verified. The system works when the instructions are followed. If something doesn't work, ask YOURSELF why, don't ask me.
From Dot Au on Usenet: Works well on dialup, since this is the only NG I use. It's quicker than my ISP, and heaps of posts too. I'd recommend it to anyone who has the shits with their ISP.
From Gazwad: A friend thought I had a high-speed satellite connection when I showed them just how fast binaries were retrieved.
Overview - How it Works
As already stated, you will be setting up your own news server on your PC and it will provide you with access to the groups that you choose. Space requirements are minimal if you don't go overboard on the number of news groups you manage through your news server.
The news server software is called Hamster. It will pull news articles from various sources and allow you to read and reply to those articles via your preferred NNTP news client - just the same as your ISP's news server does now, only on a much smaller scale.
The scale of your news server is kept small because, out of the thousands or tens of thousands of newsgroups available from your sources (see News Sources below for more information on where your news articles will come from,) you nominate and control the groups that you want Hamster to manage for you. You do this by choosing your preferred groups from the list of groups made available by your news sources. This may be as few as one, two or three, or as many as you have disk space and processing power to support.
Because the news server is being setup on your local machine, you have control over what the news server does. This control allows you to use Hamster to capture your Usenet posts, perform some pre-processing, and send them as e-mails to a Mail2News gateway instead of as Usenet posts to your ISP's news server. The Hamster news server achieves this by converting your post to an e-mail and sending it via Argosoft's freeware SMTP server, which you will also install and run from your machine. Again it's just like your ISP's mail server but on a much smaller scale.
Once your e-mail reaches the Mail2News gateway, the gateway strips the mail headers and posts your article to Usenet via its news server, not via your ISP's server. This means that your articles are posted to Usenet from somewhere other than your ISP's news server.
When the article is posted by the Mail2News gateway it is treated as any other Usenet post, that is, it is shared with other news servers (peers.) Your article eventually makes its way back to one of the news servers you are pulling articles from. When Hamster next connects to the servers that you set it up to pull from, it retrieves your article, stores it in its database, and makes it available to your news client.
Anonymous
Posting versus Pseudo-Anonymous
The term pseudo-anonymous is used here to distinguish true anonymous posting. When you post anonymously, you send your post to a remailer and the remailer fowards your post using its own credentials. When the message gets to its final destination, the destination has no way of knowing the original source of the message. That is anonymous posting.
In the method described here, you will be sending your messages direct to a Mail2News gateway, not to a Mail2News gateway via a remailer. Posting direct to a Mail2News gateway is pesudo-anonymous because the gateway knows your IP address, but no attempt is made by the gateway to verify your identity. Even though the Mail2News gateway knows your IP, it will not be included in your Usenet post. Consequently people reading your posts in a newsgroup cannot identify you.
Other
Advantages
Besides the fact that this setup allows you to post pseudo-anonymously, if you subscribe to binary groups, the method can greatly increase your article reading experience. This is because Hamster runs in the background, pulling articles from the nominated groups on the various servers that you have given it access to. As long as your machine is running, Hamster will keep pulling articles for you at regular intervals. Instead of taking minutes or hours to download articles direct from your news client, they are available instantly from Hamster.
Those of you who use SB News or any other binary grabber will be amazed at the speed difference. One Usenet user who set this system up commented that someone thought he had a high-speed satellite connection when they were shown just how fast binaries were retrieved.
In many instances, this setup will be much quicker, far more reliable, and far more up to date in terms of article currency than is probably available from your ISP. Article retention can be customised to suit your needs. Missing segments from binary posts can be greatly reduced if you subscribe to external news services that offer binary groups and pull from more than one source.
Assumptions
This article makes a number of assumptions that you must be aware of as you progress through the instructions. Failure to keep these assumptions in mind may cause you to setup your installation incorrectly for your working environment, thus the system may not work as described, or may not work at all.
If the assumptions are invalid for your working environment then you must adjust the instructions accordingly.
A1. Outlook Express is your NNTP news client.
A2. You DO NOT have Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) running.
This means that the IIS Admin Service is not running.
A3. Assumption A2 implies that you DO NOT have any SMTP server running.
Assumptions A2 and A3 mean that you are not running any software that uses TCP ports 25 (SMTP) or 119 (NNTP).
If you have another SMTP server running, the Argosoft SMTP server will not process your outgoing mail.
A4. Assumption A3 implies that you will have to setup an SMTP server on your PC.
This article assumes that you will download and install Argosoft's freeware version of its SMTP server. Link provided later.
Hamster provides an SMTP server but it will be disabled by these instructions later. This article was developed to get you posting pseudo-anonymously. The Hamster SMTP server requires you to specify yet another SMTP server for it to connect to. Hamster assumes that you will be using your ISP's SMTP server. This situation is not acceptable for the purposes of this article, hence the reason for using Argosoft rather than Hamster's built-in SMTP server. There is no reason, other than the need for pseudo-anonymity, why you cannot switch to Hamster's built-in SMTP server and link to your ISP's server, but this article does not deal with that matter.
A5. You will pull articles from news.maxwell.syr.edu and newscache1.freenet.de.
See News Sources below for more detail on news.maxwell.syr.edu and newscache1.freenet.de.
Assumption A5 means that these instructions will not show you how to setup your ISP's news server with Hamster, or any other news server. It implies that you will figure out how to do it yourself.
A6. Argosoft and Hamster will be running on your local PC.
If you have a network, both Argosoft and Hamster can operate on any machine you have access to. Assumption A6 means that these instructions will not deal with this option.
A7. These instructions assume that Hamster is installed to C:\HAMSTER
News Sources
You need at least one reliable source for your news articles. A source is called a suck feed or a pull feed. The more suck feeds you have, the better, up to a maximum of about four. This number of servers is needed in case one source goes down, as well as to decrease the time you wait for your posted articles to propagate through Usenet and back to your news server.
Syracuse University has a public, text groups, read-only news server at dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu. No logon credentials are required.
Indvidual.net, formerly known as news.cis.dfn.de, provides a free, text only, reading and posting service. Request a free reading and posting Usenet account here: http://www.individual.net/register.html - Note: Do not post from this service if you wish to remain anonymous. The server reveals your IP address and you are required to post with a valid e-mail address. This service is highly recommended as a news feed for your Hamster.
Freenet.de provides public, read-only access to text groups. Choose from newscache0.freenet.de, through to newscache5.freenet.de. newscache1.freenet.de has been tested with these instructions and, in terms of speed, it is as fast as the free service provided by individual.net.
freenews.netfront.net is also a high speed, read-only, text groups, public server. As with newscache(n).freenet.de and dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu, no logon credentials are required. freenews.netfront.net is served out of Hong Kong by netfront.net.
Step
1: Choose
and Test Your Pull News Servers
Setup two new News accounts in Outlook Express. One for news.maxwell.syr.edu and one for newscache1.freenet.de:
Server Information for newscache1.freenet.de
Neither news.maxwell.syr.edu nor newscache1.freenet.de require logon information. Do not specify an account name or a password.
You are setting these accounts up in OE only so that you can quickly make sure that the servers are working, that you can read articles from them, and that they are fast enough for your needs. If one or both servers fail to work, you will either need to decide if the server is running, perform some troubleshooting, or locate another source for your articles. It is possible, but highly unlikely, that the servers are not operating. Some issues were experienced at the time this artcle was revised and tested (14/15 Aug 2003) but they were due to power outages in the US and the effects of the MSBLAST worm on infrastructure in general.
Once you are satisfied that you can pull from news.maxwell.syr.edu and newscache1.freenet.de you can delete the test accounts in OE. However it is recommended that you keep them for testing purposes in case you have trouble later.
Step 2:
Download Software
You will need to download the freeware news server, Hamster 2.0.0.1, from here:
You will also need a local SMTP server. If you have Windows XP Professional, you can install IIS and use its built-in SMTP server. An easier alternative is to download and install Argosoft's freeware SMTP server. See assumptions A2, A3 and A4.
Step 3:
Install Argosoft
The default download name for Argosoft is agsmail.exe. Run agsmail.exe and follow the bouncing ball. Consult Argosoft if you have issues installing the software.
Step 4: Configure and
Test Argosoft
When you run the Argosoft Mail Server for the first time, as a security mechanism, it starts with mail relaying turned off and it will generate an error message. Click OK and ignore the message. You will not recieve the message again.
The Argosoft interface should display a list similar to the following:
16/08/2003 1:40:11 PM - SMTP Server started. Listening on port 25
16/08/2003 1:40:11 PM - POP3 Server started. Listening on port 110
16/08/2003 1:40:11 PM - Finger Server started. Listening on port 79
16/08/2003 1:40:11 PM - Web Server started. Listening on port 80
Message size limit 5 MB
Winsock version: $0101
High version: $0202
Description: WinSock 2.0
System status: Running
Maximum sockets: 32767
Local host: p4srvr2003
Local addresses: [Your local IP]
Local host after reverse lookup: [Your PC name]
If you receive error messages in the first four lines to the effect that Argosoft cannot access one or more ports, re-read assumptions A2 and A3, then troubleshoot the cause.
Select Options from the Tools menu and click the red check mark. Argosoft should respond that it has detected a DNS server and ask you if you want to use it. Click Yes. If you do not receive this confirmation prompt, there is either something wrong with the specified DNS server or you have an incorrect IP address for your DNS server so you will have to troubleshoot the cause. See the Argosoft help text for more information on DNS.
Continue configuring Argosoft. At this point you should still be on the General tab:
Check to enable Load Server at Windows Startup and Allow Relay.
Check to disable the Web Interface and uncheck Allow Creation of Accounts from Web.
Hamster general seetings
On the Local Domains tab, add your local loopback address as a local domain, i.e. 127.0.0.1.
On the SMTP Authentication tab, enable SMTP Authentication and enter local as the SMTP user name and local as the SMTP password. You can change these settings later. SMTP authentication is being enabled now as a security measure.
In the Do NOT Authenticate the Following IP Addresses text box, enter your local loopback address, 127.0.0.1.
Click OK. If Argosoft gives you a message box with an OK button at this point, simply click OK again.
On the Tools menu, choose Users and add a new user. Enter the word local for User Name, Real Name, Password and Confirm Password. Do not complete the remaining forward and return address fields.
Click OK, click Close. Quit Argosoft by selecting Exit from the File menu then start it again from the shortcut created for you during installation.
To test the SMTP server, create a new mail account in Outlook Express or your preferred e-mail client. The incoming POP3 server is 127.0.0.1. The outgoing SMTP server is 127.0.0.1. The account name and password are specified only for the POP3 account, which are, if you have followed instructions, local and local.
POP3 settings for Outlook Express
Account settings (password is local)
You should now be able to send e-mail from your mail client via Argosoft. Consult the Argosoft and Outlook Express help text if you have problems. The test e-mail account in your e-mail client can be deleted when you are finished with it, but it is recommended to keep it for testing and troubleshooting purposes.
Troubleshooting Hints
If OE reports that it could not send the message and returns an error message from Argosoft that the user is not local, you probably did not follow the instruction that states you must enable relay.
When Argosoft sends
mail, the icon in the system tray should look like this: 
Once the mail has been sent (or bounced
for bad addressing,) the icon will revert to blue & grey. If the
icon turns red and yellow and stays that way, check your DNS
settings. Also check the Argosoft logs. Read the Argosoft help text.
Software that is designed to intercept e-mails and perform virus scans of outgoing messages may be the cause of failure. If you experience problems sending mail via Argosoft and you have such software, disable it.
Step 5: Install and Run
Hamster
Installing Hamster is a breeze. Reading the help text is another matter. Parts are in German and other parts of the text that is in English have been translated into English from German.
To install Hamster, simply extract the files in the downloaded zip archive into a directory. These instructions assume C:\HAMSTER
Locate and run Hamster.exe, choose your default language and click OK.
Ignore any yellow warning messages and proceed to step 6.
Step
6: Configure Hamster
Select Automation on the Configuration menu and deselect POP3, SMTP and OLE on the General tab.
Click OK.
Select Exit from the File menu and restart Hamster.
If you received yellow warning messages the first time you started Hamster, you should now no longer have them when you start it the second time.
The Threads tab should indicate "Local NNTP-server started".
Create a User
Account in Hamster
On the Configuration menu, choose Accounts & Passwords.
Click Add User.
Type the word local and click OK. This will create a user account named local. When the Edit Hamster Account window opens, click Change on the General tab and set the password as local. Click OK, retype the password (local) and click OK again.
Click OK to dismiss the Edit Hamster Account window.
Click OK to dismiss the Local User & Passwords window.
The Threads tab should indicate "Configuration loaded".
Set Posting
Options
Select Local Servers on the Configuration menu.
On the Additional Options tab (half way down the screen,) check Allow POST with unknown groups and click OK.
Information: This option allows you to reply to cross-posted messages that contain a news group that you do not normally pull. If you do not set this option, Hamster will not accept cross-posts to unknown groups. Also note that Hamster has a default limit of two unknown groups when cross-posting without follow-ups. Consult the Hamster help text for information on MaxUnknownGroupsInRe to increase this limit.
Note also that each of the Mail2News gateways have their own limits on the number of groups that can be cross-posted to, with or without followups. If you are cross-posting and your messages are not appearing, the Mail2News gateways may have silently dropped your posts for going beyond their restrictions.
Configure News
Sources
On the Configuration menu, choose News: server, groups, pulls... On the Settings tab, select pull only the xxx newest: from the dropdown boxes for both Pull-Limits. Leave the limits at 100 for now. You can change them later.
Double check that you have selected pull only the xxx newest: from the dropdown boxes. Failure to set this option correctly will cause Hamster to pull old messages.
On the Newsserver tab, click Add. Replace news.xxx.xx with:
dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu
Click OK to enter the server. Click OK again to dismiss the Newsserver-settings window.
Still in the News Configuration window, on the Newsserver tab, click Add again. Replace news.xxx.xx with:
newscache1.freenet.de
Click OK and check Server is "readonly", i.e. do not post articles to it
Click OK. Click OK again. OK once more to dismiss the News Configuration window.
On the Online menu, select All Servers (News + Mail)
Both of the servers entered above should go online. The Hamster status bar will show bytes read, and the threads window will show that Hamster is getting the server-info. This means that Hamster is pulling the list of newsgroups available on the two read-only servers.
Hamster pulling the newsgroup list from each server
The bytes will stop clicking over and a server ready message may appear in the Hamster threads window. This indicates that Hamster has finished pulling the list of available groups. Proceed to the next step only when Hamster is finished.
Information: Recall from the overview that multiple sources are used to help ensure that you receive new Usenet articles as quickly as possible. Hamster does not duplicate posts in its databases that have come from different sources if the message IDs are the same.
Configure News
Groups
On the Configuration menu, choose News: server, groups, pulls... The entries for the servers should be listed with one in green and one in black. Green indicates Hamster regards the server as read-only. Black indicates Hamster is allowed to send posts to the server. If you have followed instructions, you should have one green server name and one black name. One posting server is required by Hamster even though both servers are actually read-only.
Click on the black dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu entry and click the Select button at the bottom right of the screen. This will set dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu as the preferred post server, even though we are not able to post to that server. These steps have to be taken because if they are not, Hamster will post your articles straight to its databases and we will not be able to pick them up for forwarding to the Mail2News gateways.
News Configuration screen showing dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu as the Preferred Post-Server
Click on the black dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu entry again then click News-Pulls. After some rather busy activity, Hamster should show a list of groups available on dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu. In the top right-hand corner of the window is a dropdown box. It should say match (regexp). To the right of that is a text box. Enter alt.test into the text box. A number of groups will appear with alt.test in the name. Near the top of the list is alt.test itself. Double-click the name alt.test and click OK to dismiss the Select news-pulls window.
Select news-pulls showing alt.test is to be pulled from dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu
Click on the green newscache1.freenet.de entry then click News-Pulls. After some rather busy activity, Hamster should show a list of groups available on newscache1.freenet.de. In the regexp text box, enter alt.test. A number of groups will appear with alt.test in the name. Near the top of the list is alt.test itself, this time the group is listed in blue. The blue entry indicates that the group is being pulled from elsewhere. Double-click the name alt.test and click OK. Click OK again.
Hamster has just been told to pull articles from the newsgroup alt.test from both of the servers; newscache1.freenet.de and dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu. The Hamster threads window should show the message Configuration loaded.
We are sucking articles from both servers to ensure we have the latest articles available as early as possible. Hamster will look after duplicates by discarding them.
Hamster is now ready to pull the newest 100 articles from alt.test. On the Online menu, select All Servers (News + Mail)
Hamster pulling upto 100 articles from both news servers
You will know when Hamster has completed the suck if you watch the Hamster Threads screen.
Configure
Outlook Express News Account
When Hamster has finished the jobs from the previous step, start Outlook Express and create a new news account. The news NNTP server is 127.0.0.1. You are required to logon as local with the password as local.
Outlook Express News Server Name details
Outlook Express News Server Logon details
If you are using Outlook Express, you will be asked to subscribe to newsgroups. Click Yes in OE. You will see two newsgroups, alt.test and internal.misc. Subscribe to alt.test. You should be able to read Usenet posts.
Do not attempt to post any articles at this stage. There are more things to be done before you can post.
NOTE: Hamster is set to report warnings. You will receive yellow warnings when the news client disconnects from Hamster. Either ignore these warnings or select General Settings from the Configuration menu and deselect the yellow Warn and the blue System alerts.
Hamster Settings showing Warn and System messages disabled
Configure Hamster Posting
You will need the two hamster scripts that have been specially written for this article. One will cause Hamster to pick up your Usenet posts and send them to various Mail2News gateways. The other causes Hamster to pull news articles from your servers every three minutes. If you have followed instructions, you will not need to make any changes to either of the scripts.
1. Save this page as a text file from your browser then rename it to mail2news.hsc
2. Save this page as a text file from your browser then rename it to autopull_nopost.hsc
Important: Do not simply copy the text from the two pages above into Notepad because extra lines will be inserted if you do so. These extra lines will break the script and cause errors when they are executed. You must save the page as a text file then rename the files and their extension as instructed.
Save both files into the hamster directory.
On the Scripts menu, select Manage scripts and modules. Select the Scripts tab. Mail2News.hsc and autopull_nopost.hsc should be listed. If both are not listed, you did not extract them into the Hamster directory.
Manage Scripts and Modules showing the required Hamster scripts
Click Close.
On the Configuration menu, choose Automation and select the Actions tab.
Click the + symbol to the left of News/Postings.
Click the + symbol to the left of Process.
Click on Outgoing News.
Select Mail2News.hsc from the dropdown box listed under Run script.
Check Wait for end of script and click OK.
Hamster Automation settings showing that Outgoing News will be processed by Mail2News.hsc
Information: The Mail-to-News-Gateway listed in the above screen should be ignored. The option is used to allow Hamster to process incoming mail and post it to newsgroups. It is not the mechanism that we need to achieve our purpose of processing a Usenet post into mail.
Test
Hamster Posting
You can now send a test message into alt.test from the news account that you created earlier in your news client. A few milliseconds after hitting the send button, Hamster should process your post and forward it to the Argosoft server for mailing. The Argosoft icon should turn red and yellow and it should attempt to send your post as a mail message to the five Mail2News gateways.
Hamster picking up your post to alt.test and sending it as a mail message to the Argosoft server. Note that this may happen too quickly for you to see on the Hamster screen.
The Argosoft mail server delivering the mail to the five Mail2News gateways
Wait for a minute or two after Argosoft has sent the e-mails then on Hamster's Online menu, select All Servers (News + Mail). Hamster should go online and pull more articles. Your article should appear in the alt.test newsgroup on the local account of your news client that you created to use with Hamster. If your article doesn't appear, it could be that the news servers are running behind or you have not refreshed your subscribed group in your news client. Don't forget to refresh your news client.
If your message did not appear, wait some more then put the servers online again before refreshing and checking your Hamster news account in your news client.
What should have happened is that you posted a Usenet message via your news client, Hamster processed the post, the script picked up the post from Hamster and sent it via e-mail to the Mail2News gateways. The Mail2News gatways should have propagated your post all over Usenet and it ended up at one or both of the two servers you are pulling from. Hamster then sucked your post from one of those two servers and it reappears in your news client.
Do not proceed to step 7 until you know you can send posts as described above.
Troubleshooting
Hints
At the time this article was being compiled and checked, the gateway at anon.lcs.mit.edu was up and down. Argosoft sat for a few minutes waiting for the connection to time-out. The mails were then sent to the other recipients after a few minutes waiting. If you suspect a gateway is down, you can edit Mail2News.hsc and put a hash (#) in front of the offending gateway thus:
#ListAdd ($Mail2News, "!RCPT TO: ...
It is important to note that your post SHOULD NOT appear immediately in your news client. The whole process relies on intercepting your article and preventing Hamster from posting it to its databases and to Usenet. Instead, we use a separate mechanism to send the post as an e-mail to an external Mail2News gateway. If the process is working correctly, Hamster will never put your posts directly into its databases thus they will never appear immediately in your news client. Hamster will only ever retrieve your posts from Usenet, just as it retrieves everyone else's posts.
If you suspect that Hamster is posting your articles into its databases because they are appearing immediately, double check your configuration against these instructions. You should also check the headers of your post using your news client. If the post came through one of the five Mail2News gateways, the gateway should be identified in the headers. If the post arrived at your news client because Hamster posted it locally, there will be no reference to any Mail2News gateway in the headers.
Hamster places your Usenet post into a directory called News.Out, which resides below the Groups directory. The Mail2News.hsc script picks up the post from News.Out, process the file then places it into Mail.Out, which resides below the Mails directory. The message is deleted from Mails.Out when it is sent. You can manually monitor these directories to verify that the process is working.
Information:
Why Send to Five Gateways?
The Mail2News gateways are extraordinarily reliable and have been operating for a number of years, however like all other servers, they do go down occasionally. anon.lcs.mit.edu was down for at least a week recently. this was because something went wrong on the server and the university is prone to allowing its staff to take holidays from time to time.
Sending to all five gateways ensures that your post will get into Usenet even if only one gateway is operating. Your post only appears once because every Usenet post has a message ID. Your posts contain a message ID, which is generated by Hamster. If a server receives your post from multiple sources, the receiving server will check the message ID and silently drop duplicates.
Speed of propagation is another reason to send to all five gateways at once. The mechanism ensures that your post is passed on by the fastest available gateway. If you check the headers of your posts as they arrive from Usenet, you will notice that the posting gateway changes from time to time.
Information:
Security
If you are operating your system behind a router that provides NAT services, the NAT firewall will prevent external sources gaining access to your NNTP and SMTP servers if the appropriate ports are closed.
If port 25 is open, the Argosoft SMTP server is setup to not allow relay from any external source unless that source authenticates itself. The password and user id used in this example (local, local) is very weak. If you have port 25 open, you should strengthen the user ID and password used in the SMTP server.
Hamster is configured to only allow access from your local loopback address (127.0.0.1). External sources will be unable to access your NNTP server but this can be changed. Consult the Hamster help text for information on binding and security.
Step 7:
Finishing Off
The last step is to automate Hamster's pulling of news articles. The autopull_nopost.hsc script that should have been downloaded and extracted earlier will cause Hamster to pull news articles every three minutes. This means that you do not have to put your servers online to get articles. Hamster will do it for you quietly in the background.
Create a shortcut to Hamster.exe and add autopull_nopost.hsc to the target as in this example:
C:\HAMSTER\Hamster.exe autopull_nopost.hsc
The autopull script will start whenever you start Hamster. After setting up the shortcut, in Hamster, select Exit from the File menu and quit hamster. Start Hamster via the new shortcut. The Hamster Threads tab should indicate that the script is ready and the two servers should go online to pull articles.
That's it. You can now subscribe Hamster to other newsgroups and remove alt.test. Be aware that Hamster will not remove groups if they are in use, so either exit your news client or go to your mail inbox first. In OE, this will disconnect your client from Hamster.
Under some conditions, deleted newsgroups may be reassigned as internal groups so they will still appear in the newsgroups list. In Hamster, internal groups are listed in blue. All but internal.misc can be deleted from Hamster's internal groups. If in doubt, read the Hamster help text. Be sure to refresh the newsgroups list in your news client when you delete groups.
Information:
Binaries
The setup described here provides you with access to text only news groups. Once Hamster is up and running and you are successfully posting via Mail2News gateways, you can also add your news account with your ISP as a suck feed for binaries. Third-party pay-for-service providers can also be added.
Using your ISP for binary pulls is quite safe in terms of posting privacy since you do not post news articles from any of the servers that Hamster gets its articles from. Refer to assumption A5.
Information:
Hamster
If you want to know more about Hamster you can:
Read the help text
Visit http://tglsoft.de/
Search Google
Subscribe to the Hamster news groups:
Revision Date: 12 Feb
2004