Frank McCormick:
> Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I send the messages to "gmane.linux.debian.user" (Gmane group for this
>> mailing list). Then, Gmane performs its magic and transforms it into the
>> real mailing list "To:" address (debian-user[at]lists.debian.org).
>
> Yeah, but what address do you use...nntp://gmane whatever ???
It may be hard to believe, but usenet predates the concept of a URL by
more than ten years. In its early days, it wasn't even transported using
TCP/IP. That's why its addressing schemes may look a little bit weird
by today's standards.
To give you an idea: you usually use a mail-like client (think of
Thunderbird, it can do NNTP as well) and connect to a news server. These
servers offer a (usually huge) list of newsgroups you can subscribe to.
Your client regularly pulls new postings for the subscribed groups and
keeps track of what you already read etc. Posting to a group doesn't
differ much from sending an email, from a user's point of view. You just
use the newsgroup name instead of an email address as the recipient and
the posting will be pushed to your news server instead of a mail relay.
The biggest difference compared to email is probably that there isn't a
single news server that is somehow "owning" a single group. Instead,
news servers talk to each other and exchange the news they received from
users or from other servers. That way, all servers carrying a specific
group always contain (more or less) the same postings in that group and
people using different servers can communicate with each other.
It's still a great concept, if you ask me, but unfortunately people have
mostly moved away to mailing lists (which I can live with) and web
forums (which is a shame).
J.
--
After the millenium I will shoot to kill.
[Agree] [Disagree]
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