Ralph wrote:

Is that message really from AOL or is somebody being funny? I haven't
seen this message on any other newsgroups.

It seems to be official--I don't usually use AOL for USENET, so I tried
their USENET service today and first thing that happened was that it popped
up a message telling me that AOL was dropping USENET and suggesting some
alternatives.

Getting back to Phil's problem, though, the difficulty is not in setting up
Mozilla, it's in finding a news provider that carries the group you want.
USENET is not monolithic, it is a distributed service and no server carries
all groups and no group is on all servers. I've been using newsguy for
several years and have no complaints so far--it carries most of USENET with
a fairly long retention time and reasonably fast propagation. A lot of
people swear by news.individual.net (I've seen Steve Jobs post from there)
which is free and has some restrictions, one of which is that one use a
valid address. There are others--entering "usenet" at an AOL search prompt
will find a bunch of commercial services and googling "free USENET server"
will find a bunch of free ones--note that not all free servers allow
posting.

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)