Binobins About Free Newsgroup Servers You ask yourself : Why do I need to pay? There must be some free news server, I only need to find it! Yes, they are, in fact I had used that servers for a year, a long time ago. I must say that it was a disaster. I was looking for pictures newsgroups from few categories (mostly art scans, alt.binaries.pictures.artpics), so it was easier to find servers with that kind on newsgroups (as well as erotica ones) - there are much less posted files available, then on erotica ones, so the provider doesn't need to spend extra money for server and connection to maintain them. I found a bunch of newsgroups on some university host, the articles were kept for just about a week, but in order to find one missing newsgroup (with fantasy/science-fiction art - alt.binaries.dragonz) I spent several days searching for right newsgroups server. Then I have used this two free newsgroup servers for few months, but to gather all articles and posted pictures I needed to look through both of them and compare what is missing and then to download this missing from other. Some day the one server with 'dragonz' stopped. After few days of looking for some other free news server I decided to pay the professionals and not to worry ever more. I tried a couple of commercial servers (one was too slow, another one missed some articles) and eventually after next few months I found Easynews (with web-based access and Route Selector - if your connection is slow, then you can see why it is and subsequently change route to maximize your speed). From Easynews I also started to download music and movies, that were missing on free servers. If you are still looking for free newsgroup server then we can adjust them into one of three categories: Universities or other not-for-profit organizations servers. They include only for text newsgroups, not binaries. Corporate servers. Many of the larger computer software and services companies run usenet servers dedicated to the newsgroups concerning their products, like Borland, Microsoft, IBM, and HP. Web-Based free sites like Google. These servers offer only text newsgroups, we haven't found any free web-based usenet servier that offer binaries. Open-door news servers. In this case, someone has set up a Usenet NNTP server, is getting feeds of articles from a peer or two, but has forgotten to put a password on the server. So anyone who finds the address can just connect and download articles. That server don't work for a long time, when someone finds it, soon the host's bandwidth gets so high that they fix their mistake pretty quickly. Other - sometimes there are news servers that are testing their computers and connections before starting paying access. If you find one of them, it's your lucky day, but the connection can be very, very sloooooowwwww. If you want the good stuff, you need to pay for it. A good usenet service is much cheaper than a web site subscription and looks better on the credit card bill. If you are still intent to find and use a free newsgroup server, here is a list of web pages that collect information about open servers - Free News Servers List. Note, these sites come and go, as they must be updated almost daily when open servers are re-passworded. Go to main page