Newsgroups don’t necessarily contain news; in fact, they’re Internet bulletin boards collectively referred to as Usenet(which stands for user network). Usenet started way back in 1980—about 10 years before the World Wide Web appeared—and has been growing ever since. There are well over 100,000 newsgroups on every conceivable topic: pop culture, computers, politics, and every other special (and very special) interest. More than 100 of them are just about the Macintosh. Fortunately, in addition to being an email and calendar program, Entourage is also a newsreader. You can use Entourage to read and reply to newsgroup messages almost exactly as though they were email messages.
In fact, Entourage lets you use multiple news servers (bulletin-board distribution computers), subscribe to individual newsgroups, filter messages in your newsgroups using Rules, and post and read messages (complete with attachments, if needed). See Figure 10-35.
Tip
Be wary of arachnids when posting to newsgroups. Email retrieval robots called spiders comb the Usenet for email addresses and gather them up by the millions. The spider’s owner then slaps the addresses on a CD and sells them to spammers. Does that mean you shouldn’t use newsgroups? No, but it does mean you should exercise caution when posting. One method to avoid unwanted spam is to create a Web-based Hotmail or Yahoo email account and use it only for newsgroups. Spiders can still retrieve this address, but at least you aren’t handing them your main email address. Additionally, both Hotmail and Yahoo have sophisticated spam filters, capable of filtering most of the junk the spammers send.
Figure 10-35. If you’ve been using Entourage for email, the newsgroup portion should look familiar. Top: Click the News server, which you’ll find listed below all your mail folders. All of newsgroups on the server appear in a massive list to the right. Use the quick filter at the top of the pane to help locate your topic. Bottom: Double-click the list name to open a new window listing the messages in the selected newsgroup, and a Preview pane showing the text of the highlighted message.
Setting up a new news account is similar to setting up a new email account; the adventure begins by contacting your Internet service provider and finding out its news server address. Depending on how your ISP runs its news service, you may also need your user name and password.
Next, choose Tools → Accounts. Choose News from the New pop-up button in the resulting Accounts window. You can either enter news server information manually, or click the Setup Assistant button to have the Account Setup Assistant step you through the process of creating a news account like this:
With the Account Setup Assistant open, select the email account you want to use and enter your organization.
Entourage needs an email address because every newsgroup posting has an email address associated with it.
Click the right arrow. Enter your news server address, and indicate whether that server requires you to log on with name and password.
In this step, you’ll need to enter the address of your news server. Sometimes you get newsgroup access (and the necessary settings) from your ISP. If your ISP doesn’t provide newsgroup access, you’ll have to subscribe to a news service. They run about $10 a month, and they’re generally more reliable than news servers run by ISPs. Check out www.easynews.com, www.supernews.com, or www.newsguy.com for such services.
If you’re directed to do so by your ISP, turn on “My new server requires me to log on” and enter your user name and password.
Click the right arrow. Enter your Account ID and password.
If you told Entourage that you needed to log into your news server, you’ll have to provide the details in this step. The password is optional—if you want Entourage to save it, turn on “Save password in my Mac OS keychain.” If you don’t enter it here, you’ll have to type it every time you connect to your news server.
Click the right arrow. Give your account a name.
You can give it any name you want, such as Earthlink Newsgroups.
Click Finish.
An icon for your new account shows up in the folder list.
When you first click a news server icon, Entourage asks you if you want to download a list of newsgroups. Click Receive (see Figure 10-36, top).
Entourage goes to work downloading the list, which can be quite long—tens of thousands of entries, in most cases—and takes several minutes if you connect to the Internet with a dial-up modem. Once that’s done, though, you don’t have to do it again. You should occasionally update the list, however, by selecting the server’s icon in the folder list and clicking the Refresh button (or choosing View → Get New Newsgroups). New newsgroups appear on a more-or-less constant basis, and unused newsgroups sometimes even disappear.
The number (and nature) of newsgroups available on a particular server is up to its operators. For example, Entourage comes preconfigured to connect to the Microsoft News Server. Instead of carrying tens of thousands of newsgroups on every conceivable topic, the Microsoft News Server carries about 2,300 newsgroups, all related—surprise!—to Microsoft products. (Incidentally, these aren’t bad places to learn about Office 2008 programs: check out the newsgroup called microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage.)
Even the big ISPs rarely carry every available Usenet group. Furthermore, they may not keep individual newsgroup postings around for very long, since the storage required to do so is enormous, and the number of people who actually want to read many of these newsgroups can be very small. (Honestly, do you think you’ll be a regular contributor to alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk?)
Furthermore, many ISPs refuse to host newsgroups that carry stolen software, music, video, and other materials. In fact, your ISP may simply deny access to the alt. hierarchy, which is where the most free-wheeling (and most dubious) activities take place. That’s not to say alt.* newsgroups are fundamentally bad, but if there’s one you want to read (say, alt.guitar.beginner), you might have to ask your ISP to specifically turn it on.
Figure 10-36. Top: After you create a newsgroup account, Entourage offers to fetch the list of every newsgroup on the server. Bottom: Enter the text that you want to look for in the newsgroup’s Filter (such as mac). If you turn up an appealing topic in the gigantic list beneath, select the group and click the Subscribe button in the Entourage toolbar, to subscribe to it so that Entourage will download the latest messages on that topic every time you connect.
Warning
Like certain Web sites, plenty of newsgroups aren’t suitable for children. Similarly, because newsgroups are public, spammers tend to litter newsgroups with their cheesy schemes and material many would find offensive. No one regulates newsgroups, and no one has complete control over what can and can’t be posted there.
If you’re looking for a particular topic—guitars, for example—you can view a list of those discussions by typing a phrase into the “Display newsgroups containing” field at the top of the window. Entourage hides any newsgroups that don’t match that text (see Figure 10-36, bottom).
Try different criteria—typing in mac will show you many Macintosh-related newsgroups, but will also turn up newsgroups devoted to Fleetwood Mac, macho trucks, and GNU emacs. Typing garden shows a number of newsgroups related to gardening, but may also show newsgroups devoted to the band Soundgarden.
Once Entourage has downloaded a list of available newsgroups, it’s up to you to sift through them and select the discussions you want to keep up with.
Fortunately, Entourage makes it easy to follow the raging Internet discussions with a feature called subscriptions. To subscribe to a newsgroup, select its name in the list, and then click the Subscribe button in the toolbar. An icon for that newsgroup now appears under the server’s name in the folder list, where it acts like a nested folder.
The next time you connect to the Internet, Entourage downloads all of the messages in the discussions to which you’ve subscribed. (There may be just a few messages, or several hundred. They may go back only a few days or a couple of weeks, depending on how much “traffic” there is in each discussion and how long your news server keeps messages available.)
Tip
Entourage keeps copies of newsgroup messages in a Newsgroup Cache file located in your Office 2008 Identities folder. Over time, you’ll realize that most newsgroup messages are ephemeral things you don’t necessarily want taking up space on your hard drive. To clean out Entourage’s local cache of newsgroup messages, Control-click the name of your news server in your Folder list and choose “Clear Cache” from the shortcut menu. Entourage purges its local cache of newsgroup messages.
To read the actual messages in a newsgroup, double-click its name in the newsgroup list—which opens its list of messages in a new window. It takes just a few seconds as Entourage downloads a list of articles in that newsgroup.
You read messages in a newsgroup exactly as you read email messages. Since you’re probably reading the newsgroup to expand your knowledge of a certain topic, you may want to choose View → Arrange By → Show in Groups and choose Subject from the same submenu to gather the messages into groups according to their subject lines. (As discussed in the box on How to Process a Message, Entourage 2008’s groups provide a multitude of ways to organize your messages.)
As with normal email messages, newsgroup messages that come with file attachments appear in an Attachments section inside the message; you can save those attachments just as you would email attachments. (Exercise extreme caution with any attachment downloaded from a newsgroup.) Some particularly large attachments in newsgroups get automatically divided into multiple segments. If you’re having trouble saving a multipart attachment to your hard drive, make sure that you’ve selected the message containing the first part. Even then, you may find that joining multipart newsgroup messages isn’t one of Entourage’s strongest features.
Tip
To help sift through the spam that clogs newsgroups, you can set up news rules by choosing Tools → Rules, clicking the News tab, and then clicking the New button. Exactly as with the message rules described on “Using Message Rules you can set up rules that screen out messages from certain people, messages with certain phrases in their subject line, and so on.
Working with newsgroup messages is very similar to working with email messages. You reply to them, forward them, or compose them exactly as described earlier in this chapter (see Figure 10-37). As with email, you can use either plain text or HTML formatting, attach files, and clean up text that may have been wrapped badly somewhere along the way.
Although newsgroups are anarchic places, they also have traditions and general norms. Many of the points in “Email Netiquette” (see Step 7: Send your email on its way) apply to composing messages for Usenet, but newsgroups have a few considerations of their own:
Lurk before you post. When you read a newsgroup but don’t post messages to it, you’re considered a “lurker.” There’s no shame in lurking. In fact, you should lurk in a newsgroup for at least a few days, to get a sense of what topics are commonly discussed and who the most active participants are. Many newsgroups have cultures of their own—newcomers are always welcome, but it’s best to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes, so learn the dance.
Read the FAQ and search the archive. Many newsgroups have a FAQ (“frequently asked questions”) document available on a Web site or posted periodically to the newsgroup. These documents contain the questions most often asked by newcomers to the group—and, even better, answers to those questions! Before posting a question you suspect may have come up before, check to see if the newsgroup has a FAQ, or search a Usenet news archive (like http://groups.google.com) to see if the topic’s been covered recently.
Newsgroups are not billboards. Don’t post advertising to newsgroups. If you’re an established member of a newsgroup, a brief announcement of something relevant to the group is fine—for instance, if you’re a regular in a guitar-oriented newsgroup, you might mention that your little brother just released his first finger-style guitar CD. Similarly, a pointer in your signature to your company or your products is fine. But anything above that scale is likely to incite derisive comments or even result in abuse reports to your ISP.
Avoid extensive cross-posting. Posting a message to more than one newsgroup is called cross-posting. It’s OK to post to a handful of newsgroups if you genuinely aren’t sure where your question or message is most appropriate. But widely cross-posting a message isn’t much different than spamming, and so your message will be treated much like spam: derided, ignored, or even reported to your ISP.
Avoid HTML formatting. Due to Usenet’s text-based nature, millions of people access newsgroups using old computers, old software, and slow connections. HTML-formatted newsgroup messages are frowned upon because they take longer to download and don’t look good in a wide variety of newsreaders. If the major participants in a particular group all use HTML and no one objects when they do it, then posting HTML-formatted messages is probably fine. Otherwise, always use plain text.
Avoid “me-too” messages. As a general rule, don’t respond to messages if you’re only going to agree with or restate what has just been said. (If you absolutely must say “I second that!” at least refrain from quoting the entire previous message in your response.)
Neither a troll nor a flamer be. Tossing out provocative or insulting statements just to stir up other newsgroup participants is called trolling, and it’s frowned upon. On the other hand, don’t respond to abusive or deliberately provocative messages. You may incite a flame war, in which a newsgroup degenerates into increasingly vitriolic exchanges and insults. When a flame war erupts, reasonable people tend to abandon the newsgroup, sometimes never to return. If a particular person in a newsgroup always pushes your buttons, create a rule (see Setting up message rules) so you never see newsgroup messages from that person.
Tip
Although Entourage is an OK newsreader, some of its newsgroup features are limited and awkward. If you find yourself participating in Usenet newsgroups regularly, consider a separate newsreader program that offers more comprehensive features—full threading, message scoring, FAQ retrieval, and more. A good newsreader can vastly improve your Usenet experience.
You can find good lists of Mac newsreaders at www.newsgroups.com and www.macorchard.com/usenet/. In particular, check out Thoth or one of the numerous descendents of NewsWatcher.
Entourage keeps track of two sets of preference settings: one covering how email and newsgroups are handled, and one handling Entourage’s general behavior. The following section details the email and newsgroup options.
You can view the mail and news preferences by choosing Entourage → Preferences and looking under Mail & News Preferences in the lower part of the preferences list. The Mail & News Preferences section, shown in Figure 10-38, is divided into four panels: Read, Compose, Reply & Forward, and View.
Figure 10-38. In the Compose section of Entourage’s Mail & News Preferences you’ll find the options for creating and sending messages. You might find it helpful to turn on “Append file name extensions” so that your attachments always bear their telltale file type for the aid of your PC-using correspondents.
The controls under this section govern what happens when you read your email, and they’re divided into three parts: Messages, Languages, and IMAP. As you’ll soon discover, some of them are intended exclusively for the technically minded.
Messages governs what happens to open messages that you delete or file (such as whether Entourage closes the message window or opens the next message in line). You can also specify how many seconds have to elapse, with a message open in front of you, before Entourage considers it as having been read, and therefore no longer displays its name in boldface type. For example, if you’ve set the “Mark message as read after displaying for _ seconds” option to 3, Entourage waits three seconds before considering an open message as having been read. This feature can be useful if you like to skim through your messages, glancing for just a few seconds at each, without changing their unread status.
Languages lets you select a character set (including non-Roman alphabet sets like Cyrillic, Greek, or Korean) for messages that arrive without a specified character set. Set this option to the character set that you read most often—usually your primary language group.
IMAP. If this box is checked, deleted IMAP messages don’t show up in your message lists. If this box isn’t checked, IMAP messages marked for deletion will still be visible in their respective folders, with a red X displayed next to the message and a red strike-through line through the message.
This set of preferences controls what happens when you’re writing messages. It’s divided into three parts: General, Attachments, and Recent Addresses.
The General checkboxes govern whether Entourage checks the names of your addressees against your default directory service (which is generally only useful if your company organization runs its own; see Step 1: Addressing the message) and whether or not you like to keep copies of sent messages in the Sent Items folder.
You can also govern whether the HTML Formatting toolbar is visible when you’re composing mail, and you can specify your preferred format for mail and news messages—plain text or HTML.
Attachments lets you set up how Entourage processes file attachments—how you want such files to be compressed and encoded, and whether or not you want Windows file name suffixes added automatically.
This dialog box also controls whether or not Entourage sends file attachments to addressees in the Cc and Bcc fields, on the assumption that you may sometimes want to send the file only to the primary recipients, but send the message to a long list of other people (whose addresses are in the Cc or Bcc fields)—the most common way of doing business.
Recent Addresses controls whether Entourage offers to autocomplete the last 200 email addresses you’ve sent or received (ones that aren’t in your Address Book) when you’re addressing messages. Some people find this feature annoying and turn it off, but others find it useful to be able to quickly re-enter email addresses without first having to create an address book entry for them.
These controls govern replies and forwarded messages:
Include entire message in reply. When you reply, this option adds the text of the original message, for your recipient’s reference. Unless the original message is short, you’ll want to edit down the original as you compose your reply.
Use quoting characters when forwarding. This option adds quoting characters to each forwarded message’s text. The > symbols are an Internet convention used to make it clear that you didn’t write the bracketed text. If you turn off this box, Entourage will instead insert tags above and below the message to indicate where quoted text starts and stops.
Reply to messages in the format in which they were sent. If this box is turned on, Entourage chooses the message format (HTML or plain text) according to the formatting of the original message. Uncheck this box to use the format you’ve specified on the Compose tab of the Mail & News Preferences dialog box.
Reply using the default account. If this box is turned on and you have more than one email account, Entourage always uses your default (primary) account to send replies—even if the original message was sent to a different account.
Mail Attribution. If you like, Entourage can tack on some stock text that introduces a message you’re answering. As you can see in the edit box, Entourage can even incorporate the sender’s name and/or email address, or the date the original message was sent, into this boilerplate text. As with signatures, some people get clever with these lines, coming up with introductory lines like this: “On [DATE], [NAME] is thought to have uttered:”
Place insertion point before quoted text. This little checkbox puts the cursor at the top of the email message when you create a reply or a forwarded message. Turn this option on if you like your reply to appear above the original message text, and off if you like to type your reply below the quoted text.
News Attribution. Like the Mail Attribution option, the News Attribution option automatically fills in some basic information when you reply to a newsgroup message. This attribution can display the message’s author, the date, the time, and the article ID of the message to which you’re replying.
These controls manage how Entourage displays messages, subscriptions, and quotes:
Show unread messages as bold. This checkbox is responsible for displaying the names of unread messages in bold type in the message list.
Show messages using these colors. Lets you choose colors (instead of—or in addition to—bold text) to indicate which messages have been read. After turning on this box, click the color swatch next to the words Unread and Read to choose from a menu of 16 different colors. (Or choose the 17th option, Other, which opens the Mac OS X color picker for a seemingly infinite variety of color choices.)
Show attached pictures and movies in messages. Entourage generally displays picture or movie attachments right in the message window, saving you the trouble of opening them. This option can, however, make such messages take longer to appear on the screen.
Show contact picture in message header. If you’ve added a picture to a person’s contact in your Address Book, choose this option to display their smiling face (or whatever picture you’ve chosen to represent them) at the top of each of their messages.
Show newsgroups and IMAP folders using these colors. When turned on, this option lets you color-code the names of newsgroups and IMAP mail folders to which you’ve subscribed or haven’t subscribed to.
Color Quoting. In this multihued box, you can change the color given to various levels of text quoting—levels one through four, at least.
For example, suppose you write to your boss: “How does it look?” She writes back to you, “How does WHAT look?”—and you see your own original query bracketed (>) and in blue type. When you reply to her, your original question now appears with double brackets (>>) and in the second-level color you choose here. This color-coding can make it simpler to follow a protracted discussion taking place via email or a newsgroup.
Anything higher than level-four quoted text takes on the same color as level-four quoting. To change a color, click one of the text strings in the box and select a new color from the menu that pops up.