Trinity Hall CSG

Usenet News with Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free news and email client available for most operating systems, including Windows, MacOS X and Linux. For installation instructions on Windows see the Thunderbird email page.

Before you can read newsgroups, you need to add a News account.

Click on Tools -> Account Settings, then click the Add Account button. Make sure "Email account" is selected, then click Next.

Type the name you would like to appear in sent messages in the Name box (possibly your full name), and your email address(or the munged form) in the Email Address box. Click Next.

Type nntp-serv.cam.ac.uk in the Newsgroup Server box. Click Next.

Enter a name for the account - nntp-serv.cam.ac.uk or "Cambridge News Server" would be fine. Click Next.

Click Finish.

Select the news account, and there is a list of actions you can do. Click on "Manage Newsgroup Subscriptions".

This gives you a list of available newsgroups, in a collapsed tree display. You can search for specific subjects using the "Show items that contain:" box. For example. searching for ucam. shows all the cambridge-specific newsgroups. Select a newsgroup, then click "Subscribe" to read it. Click OK when you have finished adding groups.

Now under the news account you have a list of groups, with abbreviated names (for example ucam.adverts.forsale.computer -> u.a.f.computer). To read a group, click on its name. This will show a list of the messages in the upper right pane, and clicking on a message shows it in the lower right pane.