Usenet is the largest collection of newsgroups in the world. Each newsgroup has a name, for example, comp. os.Linux. announce, and a collection of messages. These messages, usually called articles, are posted by readers like you and me who have access to the Usenet servers, and then stored on the Usenet servers.

For further information please follow the link: Prepaid Usenet review

The fact that you can read and write in a group on Usenet sets it apart from most of what we now call the Internet. This is why the World Wide Web is now called the Internet. There are online newsgroups with web interfaces and e-mail lists, but Usenet is probably more convenient for most large newsgroups. This is because the articles are replicated on a local Usenet server, allowing articles to be read and posted without access to the World Wide Web, which is very important for people with slow Internet connections. Usenet articles also save bandwidth because, unlike email lists, they don't arrive and stay in each member's inbox. Thus, twenty members of a mailing list will have twenty copies of each message in their office to copy to their inboxes. However, there is only one copy of each item in the Usenet newsgroup and on the local Usenet server, and it doesn't take up anyone's inbox.

Another great feature of your local Usenet server is that the articles remain on the server even after you have read them. You can't accidentally delete a Usenet article in the same way that you can't delete a message from your inbox. So Usenet is a good way to store articles for group discussions on a local server without burdening group members. This is why local Usenet servers are very valuable as repositories for internal discussion messages on the corporate intranet, provided that the expiration date of the articles in the Usenet server software is set to a sufficiently long expiration date.

For Usenet news to work, you must open an application such as Netscape Messenger or Microsoft Outlook Express. There are various forms of character-based newsreaders on Usenet, but a proper review of user agent software is beyond the scope of this guide. By selecting a newsgroup on Usenet from the hundreds or thousands maintained by the local server, the reader can access any unread article. These are laid out in front of him. He can then decide whether to respond to any of them.

When a reader writes an article, either in response to an existing article or to start a new discussion topic, his software publishes that article on the Usenet server. The article contains a list of newsgroups to which it will be sent. Once accepted by the server, other users can read and respond to it. The server automatically terminates the article or deletes it from its internal archive according to the termination rules set in the software; the author of the article usually has little or no control over when his articles expire.

The Usenet server rarely operates independently. It is part of a collection of servers that automatically exchange articles with each other. The flow of articles from one server to another is called news flow. In simple language, we can imagine a worldwide network of servers all configured to replicate articles to each other and send copies to the network as soon as one of them receives a new article posted by a reader. This replication is done by powerful, fault-tolerant processes and gives the Usenet its power. Your local Usenet server has a verbatim copy of all the current articles in all the relevant newsgroups. Usenet is a huge worldwide collection of newsgroups. Each newsgroup has a name, for example, comp. os.Linux. announce, and a collection of messages. These messages, usually called articles, are posted by readers like you and me who have access to the Usenet servers, and then stored on the Usenet servers. This ability to read and write in a Usenet newsgroup makes Usenet very different from most of what we call the Internet today. The Internet has become a colloquial term for the World Wide Web, which (in most cases) is read-only.