The mail-to-news gateway was closed to people outside cs.utexas.edu due to massive spam abuse. If you don't have a CS account, you can check ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/ or pub/usenet-by-group/alt.answers/internet-services/access-via-email for other possible gateways.
If you do have a CS account, you use the gateway by sending email to [name of newsgroup]@cs, replacing the periods with hyphens (so, to post a message to alt.test, you'd send your message as mail to alt-test@cs). Hyphenated newsgroup names keep their hyphens in the normal place.
When you're running Netscape, open the "Options" menu, choose "Mail and News Preferences," click "Compose," and you should see two fields that show where to save a copy of outgoing messages. These probably start out as ~/nsmail/Sent. Empty those fields and hit OK, and you should be able to send mail and news.
The CS NNTP server is news.cs.utexas.edu, but you must either be logged into a CS UNIX host in the cs.utexas.edu domain or you need supply your CS UNIX login and password to your news reader. Otherwise, See http://www.utexas.edu/its/usenet/ for information on how to read news and post news using ITS's news server.
You can read news using any of the news readers available online. These include slrn, rn, trn, tin, knews, and probably others. Pine, Netscape, and Mozilla all have news-reading capability. Mozilla, Netscape and knews are X programs, but the others are text based.
Most news software has an option to cancel an article. Articles can only be removed by the user who posted them or by root (the system administrators). In trn, the 'C' option is to cancel a posting; for other news software see the man pages or online help.
This varies widely with the news software you're using. You can use the command "postnews" to post to a newsgroup; it will prompt you for what information to enter and provide some guidelines on proper use. (For more guidelines on appropriate news posting, see the policies section. If you want to post using specific news software, see the man pages or online help for that program.
This varies widely with the news software you're using. In 'rn' and 'trn', you can use 'r' or 'R' to send email to the author of a post, or you can use 'f' or 'F' to post a response to the newsgroup. (The difference is that the capital letter responses, R and F, will include the body of the message you're responding to, and r and f will not.) For other news programs, check the man pages or online documentation for help.
The staff uses the "system" newsgroup to warn people about system conditions like scheduled outages. Everyone is set up by default to read system news at the beginning of an X session, in hopes that this will help keep people informed of events that might affect them. You can type "showsysnews" to check the current status of that newsgroup. If you prefer to receive these updates as they are posted rather than just upon logging in, you can email udb@cs.utexas.edu requesting to be added to the mailing list for the system newsgroup. This is a good way to be sure you get notices in a timely fashion if you typically stay logged in for days on end to a private machine.
