If you are having trouble with Comcast provided newsgroup service, please see this FAQ.

This guide will demonstrate how to configure your Usenet
account in MS Outlook Express.

This guide uses MS Outlook Express v6.00.2600.0000 (xpclient.010817-1148)
however this should be applicable to other versions of Outlook Express
and Microsoft Outlook with only minor modification.

With the help of screen captures, this should be a relatively painless
process.

Note: This guide was originally written for Verizon and has been altered to use with Comcast.
Any reference to Verizon in the screen captures should be ignored.
-----

•Part 1:

Start up MSOE
Select the Tools menu and navigate to Accounts (refer below)



-----

•Part 2:

You should now see the Internet Accounts menu in Outlook Express.
Select Add to create a new account and then select "NEWS" to make it a usenet account.
(refer below)



-----

•Part 3:

Select the handle or name which will appear in the From: field whenever
you make a post to a Usenet newsgroup. Example: John Doe
(refer below)



-----

•Part 4:

Enter the email address that will appear whenever people reply or quote
one of your messages. Some guidelines for selecting an email address:

a) Never use your ISP address. Use an alias or a free hotmail account.
b) Obfuscate your email address so that people can't harvest it from
usenet headers or quotes. It is a well accepted practice to use
upper case to denote text that the person who wants to reply to
you directly will need to manually remove. Ex: myemailNO@SPAMhotmail.com
c) If you choose to enter a fictitious email address, please use the .invalid
domain, a common etiquette on Usenet. Ex: dontbugme@leavemealone.invalid

(refer below)



-----

•Part 5:

a) Enter the Internet News Server Name.

b) Make sure to checkmark "[x] My news server requires me to log on"
otherwise you won't be able to specify your login/password required
to access Usenet.

(refer below)



-----

•Part 6:

a) Enter your account name and password to authenticate to the Usenet
server.

Account Name:
Password:

b) Checkmark "[x] Remember Password"

(refer below)



-----

•Part 7: Congratulations - You're done! Click Finish!
(refer below)



-----

•Part 8:

Outlook Express may now prompt you to download a list of newsgroups for
your newly created account. Select YES if you see this prompt now and skip
to Part #10 in this guide.

(refer below)



------

•Part 9:

At this point, Select the Tools menu and navigate to Accounts
as per step one, once again.

Select the [NEWS] tab and notice how your account has been added to the Usenet
section as "comcast.giganews.com" which purely cosmetic.
Now is a good time to
change it and learn how to edit an account so

a) Please highlight the newly created account "comcast.giganews.com"
and click Properties

b) Notice that the cosmetic entry by which the account is identified is set
to "comcast.giganews.com" - please change it to say John Doe , to match your
posting signature. This is purely cosmetic and only displayed on your
end, so feel free to skip this step.

c) If you have multiple usenet accounts configured, say from a dialup ISP
and your Comcast/Giganews Newsgroup account, you may wish to choose the Comcast/Giganews
account as the default. If so, highlight the Comcast/Giganews account and
click the default button.

(refer below)



...after...



-------

•Part 10:

If you Outlook Express has finished downloading about 35000
newsgroups available on the Comcast/Giganews NNTP server, you can
now subscribe to the newsgroups you're interested in.

Highlight the usenet group(s) and click Subscribe. Narrow your
search by entering search criteria in the box above

-----

•Part 11:

Let's commence to make a test post .
As common etiquette dictates, please use the subject "test post - please disregard"
and make a test posting.

To see your post after it has been sent, you must "refresh" the headers. The easiest
way is to move for a second to another group then come right back to your original one.
Your post should now appear to you.

(refer below)



------

•Part 12: Useful resources.

The most important things to be aware of:

1. Please change your name to something other than comcast.giganews.com.
2. Do not post advertisements/spam in the newsgroups.
3. Do not personally attack or harrass other newsgroup participants.
4. Do not post any copyrighted material but instead post a link.
5. Do not crosspost absolutely necessary.
6. Never crosspost between newsgroups.
7. Do not post in MIME or HTML. Many people in the usenet community
intentionally disable HTML in their client. All posts should be
made in plain text. Binary posts to alt.binaries.* tree and other
binary groups should be ideally done in yENC Format.
8. comcast.giganews.com does not allow cancellation of posts due to past abuse so
please proof-read.

•Usenet Links:

What is Usenet? www.mibsoftware.com/userkt/0003.htm

Is Usenet safe? www.mibsoftware.com/userkt/0005.htm

Posting Etiquette: www.mibsoftware.com/userkt/0009.htm

Everything you could ever want to know about Usenet: www.faqs.org/usenet/

Select another Usenet client: http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Internet/Clients/Usenet/Windows/

•The most popular and robust clients under Windows which are better for binary usenet reading than
Microsoft's Outlook Express:
(not in any particular order of preference)

1) Luu Tran's XNews @ http://xnews.newsguy.com/

2) Newsbin's NewsBin Pro @ www.newsbin.com/downloads.htm

3) Forte Inc's Agent and Free Agent @ www.forteinc.com/main/homepage.php

4) Microplanet's Gravity @ cws.internet.com/news-gravity.html

5) Grabit @ www.shemes.com/grabit/

Many of these are freeware! The two favorites Xnews and Grabit are free.

yENC: The new standard of Usenet binary encoding

Q: What is yENC or messages with a [yENC] note in the subject?

A: yEnc is a new encoding method which offers efficient and proper
transmission for binaries on the Usenet (or by eMail and other applications).
Other encodings are BASE64, BinHex, UUencode, Quoted Printable, etc.
yEnc is NOT a multimedia or archival format (MOV, ZIP) nor a picture format.

Q: Why has yENC pretty much replaced uuencode as the pre-eminant binary encoding
format on Usenet?

A: News and Mail transfer require that a binary attachment is "encoded" before it is sent.
And they are "decoded" after they have been received. Normally all this is done by
your newsreader (or mail-program). You dont see it. Most dont even know it.

The encoding is necessary because the special methods for the transfer of news
& mail (protocols) require it. A message with a binary which is not encoded is
corrupted during transmission - or transmission is denied at all.

Transport of messages by News and Mail was restricted to US-ASCII characters when
the protocols were written (20 years ago). These services have been created to
transport only plain US-text. Special characters (control-characters, symbols,
non-US-characters) were forbidden - and used for special purposes. But because
people wanted to send also binary attachments by News and Mail some 'tricks'
were implemented: The binary was changed to "allowed US-ASCII-characters" before
transmission (encoding) - and back to a binary after transmission (decoding).
The usual encoding methods are still respecting these old limitations -
and are used everywhere.

Unfortunately there is a price for this 'trick': Encoding makes a message longer.
And not just a little, but 33%-40% longer than the original attachments. This
results in 33%-40% more bytes for a message - 33%-40% more time for the
transmission - 33-40% more diskspace on the harddisk where there messages are
stored (on news- and mail-servers).

Meanwhile Usenet is able to to transport more than "US-ASCII", it could also
transport other characters. Just a few special characters are still forbidden.
Unfortunetaly the encodings were never changed. We are all still using BASE64,
BinHex, UUencode. We are all wasting every day bandwidth, time, diskspace and money.

yEnc is now a proposed (and implemented in almost every alternative reader)
encoding method which is using the fact that news-servers can today transport
binaries more efficient. On eMail the situation is far more complicated because
there are a lot of older programs and computers involved. But also there would
be potential for savings.

Reprinted from »www.yenc.org - Please visit to read more about yENC.

/* Written by Sedated for DSLReports Verizon ILEC Forum FAQ on Nov 28, 2002. - Revision 2a(web)[ty Brian W] - Submitted to DSLReports as a FAQ entry for VZ group and posted to http://verizon.rules.it
*/
Editted By kadar for use in the Comcast forum.

*This FAQ is based on user knowledge from a volunteer core of BroadbandReports' members. This FAQ in no way constitutes official information from Comcast or any of its affiliates.

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by kadar edited by Johkal
last modified: 2008-11-01 14:44:35