Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!! Frustration -- mostly OT

obvious)

John

And that's exactly what it looks like I'm going to have to do, John. :S Sprint is no longer here; they have been taken over by Embarq. My only other option, apparently, is to buy a domain name from someone for my web site, and I don't know whether that's in the cards. Even so, that won't help my access to usenet. Darn! (I'm saying that, but I'm thinking worse. )

Howdy!

Sandy, my friend, it's laugh or cry!

We started out w/ AT&T, because they had a rep on the phone on a Sunday. After DSL was offered we dropped AT&T because, due to cable t.v. service changes and AT&T moving in & out of the area, AT&T couldn't give us DSL, so we changed to SBC. Then SBC merged w/ AT&T (what happened to all that scare & nonsense about monopolies & phone service & yadda-yadda?) & we ended up w/ SBC-Yahoo which is: AT&T. But they didn't offer us our old website space, the stingy butts.

Oy!

Mac's Entourage program offers access to the ng. Good luck!

R/Sandy @ $bcglobal --

That's for sure, Sandy. :S

Oy is right! Why do they call it an upgrade when we end up with fewer services than before???

Thanks, but even via Entourage (or MT-NewsWatcher, which is what I use), I have to have access to a news *feed*. Without that, no newsreader will work. Right now EarthLink is still giving me access, but that will probably change no later than October. :S The same for my web site. :(

Sandy, my ISP offers newsgroups and even rctq, BUT you cannot munge your address thru CenturyTel newsgroups. All that nasty spam that yahoo catches for me would be clogging my mailbox if I used my ISP and my "real" email addy. CenturyTel does have a spam filter, but it's unreliable- it sends my private email (the *good* stuff!) to spam almost as often as it sends the spam there. Google isn't so bad.... 'specially compared to spam. Hope you find something that works well for you.

Leslie & The Furbabies > This is only "mostly OT" because it also affects my web site (with my

obvious)

Thanks, Leslie -- it's good to hear that Google isn't so bad after all.

obvious)

John

Sounds icky to me. Have you access to Qwest? I've had good luck with them for years, but don't have a website....yet. Also, Sysmatrix is a good email/newsreader dialup service with real people to talk to 24/7. NAYY

Sandy said, "The thought of using Google is very depressing. "

I have only used Google to participate in this group. Is there another/better way?

Jerry in North Alabama

fwiw, i read it thru Outlook Express, my email reader in winXP. far easier than google once ya get it set up. tho first ya gotta config OE, then download the full list of 'titles' of groups, could take awhile as the title list has over 35K ng's. just the titles mind you. then you subscibe to the groups you fancy. theres a search in the ngs on OE to find any/every possible interest one might have in the world. all this assuming your isp actually carries newsgroups. some do, some dont. check your isp website and see. better, i guess, easier for sure. only used google when travelling and when all esle fails. jeanne

Yes. I use news.individual.net It comes to just over a dollar a month. They don't carry binary (picture) groups though. It's super easy to sign up and set up.

Ms P

Are there any other companies who offer DSL in your area at all? What about Cable? IMO, any ISP that only offers access to the web and email, and not newsgroups or space for a homepage, is just plain silly. But of course they don't think that, so... *sigh* I do hope you can find a good/reasonable solution to your problem.

That newsgroup service that someone mentioned sounded like it might be doable. As far as your webpage (which I would hate to see come down), maybe there is a free site somewhere that you could have it on, at least temporarily? Also, I recommend making sure you have an up-to- date copy of the whole shebang on your computer (and maybe even backed up on a CD-R).

Now about Google--personally that's what I'm using right now for news, email, and a place to store the occasional picture, etc. I kindof like 'em. And it's all free. I was poking around in the helpfiles for the "googlepages" service earlier, and apparently you have to have a gmail account (free) to setup googlepages (free), and then you have 100mb on googlepages. The drawback is that you have to use their clunky--and I - do- -mean- CLUNKY--interface. However, I was doing a little testing. I think you could upload everything, including the html files (as long as all of the links are..whatchacallit... don't reference the whole URL, but only the part of it that is the filename...) and then you only have to create the index page over again. Or make a portal page that you click through to the real index. Or... something.

Anyway... Good Luck! //Mary/mgl

Unfortunately, no.

Since we don't have cable TV (we have a satellite), getting cable internet is cost prohibitive. :S

I agree -- but I tend to think in stronger terms than "silly". ;)

Thanks -- I do keep all of the files on my computer. I'm sort of paranoid about that sort of thing. They're also backed up to an external drive.

Thanks for the suggestions, Mary! I'm beginning to feel better about the Google news thing, though not all of my groups are available. But that's life. At least this one is! :) As for the web site, I do have a gmail account that I use for various things where I don't want to give out my "normal" one , so that's not a problem. The big thing is the amount of space. It's less than I currently have, but it would work in a pinch, if I can't find something else I want to try in the meantime. I do appreciate the suggestion, though; I wasn't aware that Google had begun offering web sites! :)

I understand, Sandy. We are also looking for a low cost newsreader for me. We have the Mindspring/Earthlink as an e-mail address/newslink only. Have a different service to connect with the Internet (DH got fed up with the Earthlink DSL being down too often for too long--the 3 day outage was the kicker, especially right at deadline time, and he submits invoices and his articles by e-mail. That impacted our income. Not good.

Anyway, if anyone has any good ideas for news service that costs less than about $10 a month please let me know.

I don't want to have to read the group from google and I really don't like g-mail either, but that is what we (DH) has come up with so far.

Pati, > This is only "mostly OT" because it also affects my web site (with my

Pati,

I use news.individual.net for my newsreader. Costs approx $12/year. Have never had a problem - I've been using their service for two years.

Forwarded to DH. Thanks. That may be a good way to go.

Pati, > Pati,

You're welcome. Speaking of your DH, any more Wiz books forthcoming?

You know that we also lose our 20 hours of monthly dial up. I never used it much, but it came n handy occasionally when traveling.

Oh, crud! I'd forgotten about that! How in the *world* can they consider this an "upgrade"?????