Newsgroups
and Mailing Lists
No-one told me about newsgroups or discussion groups when
I first started on the Web, but they are something that I enjoy and
check every day. My server has a list of newsgoups
to which I can subscribe, and I can turn them on and off at will.
Go to HELP on your menu bar to find out how to locate them. On my
browser (Netscape Navigator), I go to FILE on the menu bar of
my email Mailbox, and select "Subscribe to Discussion Groups".
It takes quite a while to
download the list of available Discussion Groups, so go and prune your
roses for a while. When the list comes up, all you need to do (on
my browser, anyway) is put a tick next to the one you want. Don't
be afraid of the number of messages contained in some of the larger
newsgroups. Each day some messages are deleted and new ones
added. Once you have got through the initial large number of
messages, the new ones that come in
every day are more manageable.
Go down to the
"soc.genealogy." area of the newsgroups to find an area of
interest. "soc.genealogy.australia+nz" is a must for Australian
researchers, but you can find other ones for Ireland, England, America,
South Africa, and so on. Take a while to look
through a few to find some that suit you.
Mailing Lists work a bit differently. You
can subscribe to a list covering the area of your interest, and you
will get postings from subscribers direct to your email, or get them
sent in a "digest" of several postings. Your posts to the mailing
list will likewise be distributed to other members.
You can subscribe (for free!) to mailing
lists covering your particular
area of interest. Try one and see how it works. \
Newsgroups
and Mailing Lists are a bad place to put your usual email address, so
created a Hotmail or Yahoo mailing list and use those for your mailing
lists, and set your message filters to exclusive to filter out the spam.
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