AOL Strikes Again!

That works if you want the groups google wants (all text and NO binaries), plus they get less than 25% (47K out of more that 200K groups) of the available newsgroups. To me, free is good only if you get what you want.

That is why I went to Usenetmonster.com

Check out their pricing here:

Also - nice thing about UsenetMonster is that even if I change my ISP again (considering going to cable, but could move in the future also), I don't have to change newsgroup feed again and risk loosing a group (has happened before).

John W. Alger IPMS 10906 Charlotte Scale Modelers

Care to share which newserver that is?

server...christ

BT (Work ISDN), Demon (Work BB), and OneTel (Home ISDN) all have newsgroup support - here I am using Demon at home it would be Onetel

in article snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Al Superczynski at snipped-for-privacy@deadspam.com wrote on 1/25/05 6:33 PM:

Couple of thoughts on that, having just ditched AOL for Comcast high-speed cable. Guess whose address book cannot be exported? It was a multi-day job retyping and error-trapping about 15 pages of printout from the AOL address book, the only way to make the transfer. Of course, once I had it in a Word text file, Outlook Express happily imported it, no problem.

For small volume browsing (like r.e.m.), doesn't Deja News (now part of Google, I think?) fit the bill? They've got a search engine, and it's free.

Pip Moss I used to feel cheap 'cause I had no signature.

Heh. Guess whose saved emails can't be exported either... ;-p

In the early, early years of AOL I signed up here in Atlanta. They had two lines avaialble in Atlanta. One was a 2400 baud modem and one was a 1200 baud modem. At the time, state of the art was 9600 baud (WOW!). I called AOL to compalin. Asked to speak to the President. Got the President on the line. (Now you KNOW it was a long time ago!) Nice guy. He apoplogized and said the industry was just advancing to fast for him to keep up, both technically and from a capital availability standpoint. That told me all I needed to know. I switched the next day to Mindspring (now Earthlink). Stayed with their dial up service for until I switched to BellsSouth DSL this last year. I don't know if AOL still has their proprietary web addresses, but that also caused me to switch to Mindspring in the early years. Art

I've been with AOL since 1992 and had a similar experience several years ago. When they launched the new plan that switched from a "pay as you go" to unlimited minutes for a fixed fee, the explosion of new subscribers caused the phone lines in South Carolina where I was stationed at the time to literally choke and all you got was a busy signal. I called AOL and asked to speak with the President and I actually got Steve Case on the line. As you said, he was quite polite and explained the situation to me. He offered to give me two months free for my trouble and he followed through.

Steve Case - thank you. Was very nice and very forthright. AOL is a classic example of how a marketing genius can sell an inherently bad product.

Art