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10.5 MINING FOR INFO ON USENET VIA E-MAIL


Grizzled Usenet veterans (you can always tell them by the coffee-stained
leather jackets they wear) proudly recall the days when they could read
every single article posted on the network each day and still find time
to do some work.

But now, with the number of newsgroups approaching 10,000, that, of
course, is impossible.  That causes a potential problem, though.  What if
there's a discussion going on somewhere you might be interested in?
Sure, Usenet is divided into hierarchies and newsgroups with the goal of
helping people find discussions on specific topics, but given the number
of people who now post each day, even that might mean you'll miss
something.  And if you go on vacation and you come back to 2,000 new
articles in your favorite group, the temptation is awfully high to just
mark them all as read rather than trying to dig through them for
useful/interesting messages.

Meet Stanford University's Netnews Filtering Server.  Somewhere at
Stanford sits a computer that creates a daily index of all Usenet
messages that pass through it.  Through simple e-mail commands, you can
get this machine to filter out articles for you and then send you a daily
summary of what it finds.  If the summaries of each article look
intriguing enough, you can then have the entire articles mailed to you.

The basic commands are really simple.  You tell the computer what to look
for and how frequently you want to receive its reports. Send an e-mail
message to

     [log in to unmask]

Leave the subject line blank, and as the message, write

     subscribe phrase or word
     period 1

For example,

     subscribe boston bruins
     period 1

would set the machine to searching for references to the Boston Bruins
and then report back to you every day (if you substituted "period 2," it
would report back to you every two days; you can go as high as 5).
There's an optional third command, "expire,'' which you would use to tell
the computer how many days to keep looking for you.  For example,

      expire 30

would end the search after 30 days.

Now let's say you do get an article you want to read more about.  Each
article will have a message number.  To get it, write back to
[log in to unmask] and as your message, write

       get news.group.#

for example,

       get alt.hamsters.duct-tape.4601

You can also search the Stanford database for existing articles.  Again,
write to [log in to unmask]  As your message, write

       search word or phrase

You'll get back a list of possibly relevant articles.



John S. Walker
Central Supply & Services