Subject: how do i access comp.mail.pine?

From: LINEart <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 01:54:14 -0500

i've been trying unsuccessfully to access the PINE newsgroup referenced
by
http://www.washington.edu/pine/#Contact

this problem is redundant in Netscape Messenger, Outlook Express 5 and
PC-PINE 4.10
i can access other newsgroups without a problem.  am i missing a
parameter in the server field?

i assume i'm supposed to enter comp.mail.pine and nothing more for the
server name . .  .

thanks for your help

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Scott Leibrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 09:27:33 -0800 (PST)

comp.mail.pine is a newsgroup, not a news server.  You need to enter your
news server as per your ISP's instructions, and then select the
comp.mail.pine newsgroup.

Alternately, you can go to www.deja.com and do it all on the web.

-- 
Scott Leibrand
[email-masked]
http://students.washington.edu/leibrand
* RCW 19.190 notice: This email address is located in Washington State. *
* Unsolicited commercial email may be billed $500 per message.          *

---

From: "LINEart" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 14:30:02 -0500

but my ISP never had to give me instructions on how to sign into Netscape's
newsgroup or Microsoft's betanews . .
that info was provided by Netscape and MS respectively.
shouldn't PINE be the most knowledgeable source for the data i need?  After
all, i don't thnk that my ISP even knows about PINE.

ps (sorry this first posting replied directly to you and not the group Mr.
Leibrand)

---

From: Seth Kurtzberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 12:42:23 -0700 (MST)

Use Scott's "do it all on the Web" alternative, which doesn't require your
ISP's instructions.

Seth Kurtzberg
Machine Independent Software
Cell (602) 478-5511
Fax: (480) 614-8909
email:  [email-masked]
pager:  888-605-9296 or email [email-masked]

---

From: "LINEart" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 15:02:52 -0500

thanks mr Kurtzberg.  i've spent the past 10 minutes at deja browsing
through different postings.  i just hate having to wait on the web page to
refresh each time i want to go to a different message in the thread.  if i
were on a T1 line it would be alright.  but for now i'll stick with deja
anyway.

---

From: "Adam H. Kerman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 14:36:12 -0600 (CST)

>From: LINEart <[email-masked]>
>Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 14:30:02 -0500

>all, i don't thnk that my ISP even knows about PINE.

How would Netscape and MS know what news servers you are authorized by your ISP
to use? If your ISP failed to tell you, it's your responsibility to ask. If you
cannot get satisfactory customer support, drop them.

---

From: Scott Leibrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 20:08:48 -0800 (PST)

Exactly.  :)

At some point, either you, someone else, or a piece of software from your
ISP that you installed configured MS and Netscape to access your ISP's
mailserver.  If either of them works to do newsgroups, go into its Options
or Preferences and look for your mail server's name.

---

From: "LINEart" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 23:53:59 -0500

hhmm.

not sure i understand.  i, not an automatic wizard, had to configure all of
my mailsoftware to access any mail and/or news accounts i've ever had.  (the
only time this was not true was within a network at school).  i'm using pop3

for news.u.washington.edu, for example (and i'm not a univ. of washington
employee/student) i can gain access, at least to the level of contacting the
server so it gives me back a listing of available groups.  the server that
i'm contacting is news.u.washington.edu, not my ISP.  similarly, if i have
to access my school e-mail account which is served from an indy2 (unix) i've
got to enter the name of my school server in the appropriate field in my
mailsoftware options.  this is not my ISP server's IP address.

of course MS and Netscape wouldn't know anything about the PINE server's IP
address, but why would my ISP?  PINE should be the source for that, right?

are you suggesting, though, that my ISP could be denying my access to the
server name comp.mail.pine?  i'm not getting an "access denied" message,
just a "server not found" one.

thanks kindly for all of your help

---

From: Shobhit Saxena <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 10:40:25 +0530 (IST)

As far as Netscape is concerned, the news server field is set to "news"
by default, unless configured otherwise. So, if the news server has an
alias "news" as well (as is the case in our Intranet also), no other
configuration is required to browse the NGs. 

-- 
Sigh.  I like to think it's just the Linux people who want to be on
the "leading edge" so bad they walk right off the precipice.
(Craig E. Groeschel)

---

From: Scott Leibrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 21:19:08 -0800 (PST)

Good point.  I hadn't considered that, but it makes a lot of sense.  If
you're running Pine on the same machine, try putting in just news as your
news server.  Otherwise, the "alias" for news would probably be in the
LMHOSTS file or in the domain suffix search order in the DUN TCP/IP
properties.  If it's the latter, then your news server is
news.yourdomainsuffix.

---

From: Scott Leibrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 21:24:25 -0800 (PST)

Ok.  The important points here are these:

comp.mail.pine is just the name of a newsgroup.  The way USENET is set up,
news servers on all the ISPs bounce news messages around between
themselves, and organize those messages by which newsgroup (like
comp.mail.pine) they were sent to.  Therefore, you can't access
comp.mail.pine itself without going through a news server, because
comp.mail.pine is nothing more than a category under which messages are
sent.

News servers are set up like SMTP servers - each ISP has its own that is
only accessible by its own customers.  That way passwords are not
required, but there is still control over who can post where.

Therefore, you need to access your ISP's mail server (or any other mail
server that will allow access from your domain) and get the messages that
are in the comp.mail.pine newsgroup.  You can connect to
news.u.washington.edu, because it's a machine on the internet, but you
can't do anything there because you're not in the washington.edu
domain.  The same would be true if I tried to access qwestinternet's news
server, whatever it's called.

Does that make sense?

Basically, this still boils down to getting the address of a news server
you have access to, which probably means your ISP's news server.

---

From: Nancy this-address-is-valid McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 10:36:17 -0500 (EST)

On 99-12-12 LINEart <[email-masked]> wrote:
> not sure i understand.  i, not an automatic wizard, had to
> configure all of my mailsoftware to access any mail and/or news
> accounts i've ever had.  (the only time this was not true was
> within a network at school).  i'm using pop3 for
> news.u.washington.edu, for example (and i'm not a univ. of
> washington employee/student) i can gain access, at least to the
> level of contacting the server so it gives me back a listing of
> available groups.  the server that i'm contacting is
> news.u.washington.edu, not my ISP.  

I think the confusion here is that news.u.washington.edu is not a
public news server but both Microsoft and AOL/Netscape do have
public news servers, namely:

 msnews.microsoft.com
 news.mozilla.org

or at least this is what they used to be because I have these
in my pinerc news-collections lists and they worked at one time.
Anyway, these two news servers have newsgroups where people
discuss MS and Mozilla stuff, respectively. If you want to
participate in comp.mail.pine, you need to access a news server
that gets a regular Usenet news feed. Most, but not all, ISPs do
provide Usenet news so you need to ask your ISP:

 1) Do you provide access to Usenet news?
 2) If yes, what is your news server name?

And then put that info in your pinerc as your nntp-server and add
it to your list of news-collections.

Hope this helps,
Nancy

-- 
Pine info & links @ http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/
 
©Nancy McGough         http://www.ii.com/         Infinite Ink
-----== Sent via Pine 4.21 running on Debian GNU/Linux ==-----