Subject: Re: How do I access USENET newsgroups using pine 3.91?

From: Jago <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 15:44:21 -0400

On Wed, 17 Apr 1996, William Butler wrote:

[snip]
> > For hypothetical reasons, let's say you want to use news.somewhere.edu as
> > your news server.  In setup/config, you'd set the following items to
> > these values:
> > 
> > nntp-server      = news.somewhere.com
> > news-collections = *{news.somewhere.com/nntp}[]
> > 
> > Check with your system admin to see what news server you should use.
> > Also refer to the online help in Pine on those items.  Hope this helps!
> > 
> > --
> > 
> 
> I've tried this, but let's say I have a username and password on a remote
> news server (which I do).
> How do I access news.alt.net, with username FOO, and password BAR?
> 
> The university's server does not have news access of it's own.  Nor does
> it have news reader software.  This is why I am going through Pine 3.9.1.

You got me there.  My guess is that you set your news-collections so that 
you can access them via IMAP, but I think that only works for mail 
message folders, not newsgroups.  Most sites have IMAP disabled anyway, 
which is a real bummer.  Check with your sys admin to be absolutely 
sure.  Good luck!

--
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From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 09:16:20 +0100 (BST)

> > How do I access news.alt.net, with username FOO, and password BAR?

By this I'm assuming the enquirer has to provide authentication
information (username and password) as part of the news reading session
before the can post (or, in some cases, even read) News articles.

The bad news is that Pine 3.91 did not support authentication to news
servers.

The slightly better news is that Pine 3.92 did introduce support for
authentication, but only for news servers requiring you to authenticate
upon your first attempt to post an article.  Pine 3.92 could not cope with
news servers that want you to authenticate before letting you _read_ news.

The good news is that Pine 3.93 supports both forms of authentication.  If
you upgrade to 3.93 you should be able to do what you want.

> message folders, not newsgroups.

Red herring alert!

IMAP provides access to your mail folders.  It _can_ also be set up to
allow people to _read_ news from the server (if suitably configured).
News _posting_ is always done via NNTP.

In the past most NNTP servers allow computers which are allowed to connect
to them to _read_ and _post_ news without first authenticating.  However
in these days of increasing "problem" postings more News Administrators
are turning on authentication.

Once authentication is enabled some news server software happily allows
people to _read_ news without authentication, but not to _post_ news until
they have done so.  (Eg, INN 1.4)

Other news server software forces you to authenticate before it will let
you read news (or even get a list of the available newsgroups!).  (Eg,
INN1.4unoff3)

So assuming the original enquirer was having problems with such a server
they need to sort out NNTP authentication in order to be able to post
articles.  News reading _could_ be sorted out if the news server computer
also provided access to news via IMAP, but the chances are against this.

> Most sites have IMAP disabled anyway, 

Ummm, pauses to don his Pedant's hat.... they don't actually *disable*
IMAP (it isn't standard system software); the system administrators simply
haven't set it up (or perhaps even ever heard of it! :-(

Cheers,

Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
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