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Re: Questions about posting.

Subject: Re: Questions about posting.
From: "Rijk van Geijtenbeek"
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:16:39 +0200
Newsgroups: opera.mail+news


Op Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:50:57 +0200 schreef Jyoti Sharma <jyoti.mickey@xxxxxxxxx>:

How do I know that I can post in my newsgroup?

You just did post in this newsgroup, so I'm quite sure what you need to know here.

Do I need to configure this somewhere in my newreader?
How is it different from a normal e-mail?

If you send a message to a newsgroup, the messages gets send to the same news server from which you retrieve the existing newsgroups posting. For a normal mail account, you always need an incoming server (using the POP protocol) and an outgoing server (using the SMTP protocol). For a newsgroup account, all you really need is a news server, though including an SMTP server makes it possible to send messages directly to the poster instead of replying to the newsgroups.

What is "Followup" precisely?

"Followup" to a newsgroup means posting a reply to the newsgroup, where everyone subscribed to the newsgroup can read it. This as opposed to sending a reply to the mail address of the original poster. Most people nowadays make some efforts to hide their mail address, so replying the poster is often not even possible.

In the Opera Mail user interface, the same interface is used for mail and newsgroups, so clicking the 'reply' button when reading a newsgroup message will start a compose window to create a followup posting to the newsgroup. Use 'Reply all' to also send the message to the mail address of the original poster. But as I said, the latter is not really a good idea nowadays.

It is possible to enter multiple newsgroups names in the 'newsgroups' field of a compose window. You do that if you want to 'crosspost', usually because you don't know which group is the right one, less charitably if you think your messages is so important it should be seen everywhere. In such cases it is polite to set exactly one newsgroup in the 'followup' field. All followups to your posting will then automatically go to the chosen newsgroup, which will prevent fragmenting a discussion thread.

I am using Opera 9.5.




--

                                                   Rijk van Geijtenbeek
                                 Opera Software ASA, Documentation & QA
                                  Tweak: http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/

"The most common way to get usability wrong is to listen to what users
say rather than actually watching what they do." -- J.Nielsen

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