Using UseNet is a challenge, but rewards are great

By Shawn P McCarthy -- Logistics Management, 4/1/1998

In the past few years, the remarkable area of the Internet known as UseNet News has become a chaotic jumble of mixed messages. There are valuable nuggets of logistics business information, such as requests for proposals and transportation rates, buried in UseNet's 20,000 message categories. But, too often, they are lost behind piles of spam messages that scare away potential participants.

But UseNet should not be ignored. It's the Internet's main "bulletin board," where important information appears long before it can be found on mainstream Web sites. One recent study estimates nearly 30,000 people post messages to UseNet each day--and that roughly one million read those messages. Hundreds of megabytes of new data join the stream every day.

UseNet topics range from finance to firefighting to fishing. A few dozen message areas, about 1 percent of UseNet volume, deal with sexual issues, and some network managers cite this as a reason to keep UseNet off their networks. That's a shame, because it's easy enough to filter out controversial groups. What's tougher is ignoring inappropriate messages on established news groups.

Because UseNet has no central management, it's easy for shady advertisers to pour multiple messages into hundreds of news groups on servers that support the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP).

Here are some ways to separate the wheat from the ever-increasing chaff. With successful filtering, you might find UseNet to be a key source of logistics business information.

Server side: Install an NNTP server on your network and configure it to offer just a handful of newsgroups. Then add specific groups as you learn of them. I've spotted logistics-related messages in misc.transportation.trucking (trucking discussions), misc.industry.quality (deals with manufacturing quality issues), gov.us.fed.doc.bbd.solicitations (discusses federal government Commerce Business Daily postings), misc.transportation.misc, misc.alt.tranport.rail.americas (railway issues), and misc.transportation.air-industry.cargo (aircargo issues).

Client side: Many newsreaders let you screen out messages from certain addresses. You'll quickly learn which addresses post worthless messages and you can filter them from your view. Newsreaders are built into Web browsers (Collabora or Newscape News in Netscape or Go-Read News under Microsoft Internet Explorer).

Even with these filters, you'll still see lots of time-wasting spam. But you'll also find pointers to business leads, questions about where to buy products, and lists of good transportation rates others have found. Helpful people will answer your questions when you post them. Just be careful about giving out your e-mail address in open messages. You may end up with spam messages coming directly to your e-mail box.

Pointers

+ Details on how to tap into the UseNet News stream, plus answers to frequently asked UseNet questions, can be found at sunsite.unc.edu/usenet-i/.

+ The Usenet2 consortium is a group of network administrators working to establish a parallel UseNet system that they can regulate, thereby controlling spam messages.Details are available at usenet2.vrx.net.

+ Once you're on Usenet, you can orient yourself in any of the following newsgroups: news.newusers.questions; altculture.internet; alt.internet.guru; alt.internet.services.

Tip of the Month

If you don't have access to UseNet or if your news server doesn't carry what you need, you can find a list of public news servers at www.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Usenet/Public_Access_Usenet_Sites/. Select a site and tell your news browser to look to that site as your NNTP server. "View all groups" the first time you visit, then "subscribe" to the specific groups you want to monitor.; Or you can visit DejaNews at www.dejanews.com. DejaNews lets you use your Web browser to read or post to nearly every message group within UseNet News. It also lets you search across the range of messages by keyword and interest. Search results show the author's name, and you can quickly figure out which messages are garbage and which are worth reading.