Newzbin was one of the first – if not the first- Usenet indexing services. That was a long time ago and IIRC it was free back then but turned to a paysite eventually. The main achievement of the site operators was however the nzb format which made it a lot easier to download multiple files [...]

Categories: The Web

My Usenet provider of choice Giganews has reached a binary retention level of 600 days with no end in sight (That’s a huge leap considering that they were the first to reach 100 days in 2007). Binary retention refers to the time the binary data, that is the files that are uploaded to the Usenet, [...]

Categories: The Web

The Usenet can be best described to users who have never come in contact with it as a global forum with hundreds of thousands of groups and the ability for everyone to post and reply. The messages that get posted and read are called articles or posts and they are posted to so called newsgroups [...]

Categories: The Web

Users who work with newsgroups usually use desktop clients such as Newsbin, Grabit or Microsoft Outlook to do so. Some Usenet providers offer web access to newsgroups with options to download files right from the web interface which can be very comfortable in certain situations but especially when no desktop clients can be installed on [...]

Categories: Linux, Software

Mailing lists still hold an important role in many free software projects and are a place where development is co-ordinated and support provided. When you subscribe to a mailing list, you generally have the option of receiving every individual message or receiving a daily digest. However, if you need to read a few, this can [...]

Categories: Email, Software

File retention is one of the biggest arguments for or against a Usenet provider next to similarly important factors such as connection speeds, completion rate, security and the price / download ratio the service is offering. Giganews, the one and only Usenet provider that I do recommend, announced just a few days ago that they [...]

Categories: Online Services

You know that I’m a happy Giganews customer. I have been using their Usenet service for the last years and they never let me down. Sure, they are not the cheapest Usenet provider when it comes to comparing the monthly subscription prices but they quality level surpasses anything else on the market. Giganews are running [...]

Categories: Online Services, The Web

In July 2008, Giganews made big news for increasing their USENET retention to 240 days. Most other providers had a maximum of about 160 days, but several of these are now promising to surpass Giganews. Giganews is quite expensive, costing $25/month for a unlimited package. The retention and speed made up for this, but I [...]

Categories: Online Services

The best Usenet provider Giganews has announced that they will be starting to raise the Binary retention from 200 days to 240 days which equals 8 months by year’s end. This once again puts them ahead of the pack of Usenet (Newsgroup) providers. The Binary part of the Usenet are mainly those groups in the [...]

Categories: The Web