This is an excerpt from the EFF Guide to the Internet. For those looking for information on Parkinson's, medications or any other area of interest it may be one more source to use. This guide is available free of charge from the EFF online archives at ftp.eff.org, gopher.eff.org, http://www.eff.org/, CIS EFFSIG forum, and elsewhere. This guide may be freely reproduced & distributed electronically or in hardcopy, provided the following conditions are met: 1) Please do not qualitatively modify the guide, and leave all copyright, distribution, attribution, and EFF information intact. Permission expressly granted for translation to other languages and conversion to other formats. 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