anybody using BT and Thunderbird to access this group

Rick, My best advice: Ditch BT. It would not surprise me if they had stopped providing access to usenet, it has been a trend in recent times.

Move to Zen.

Not an option as BT provide phone/internet package

I'm using TB version 31.2.0, news.btinternet.com and port 119

Everything working fine

Try a different newsgroup server e.g.

I switched to it a year ago when VM's service went wobbly; CBA to switch back.

Just because you use BT for internet access doesn't mean you have to use BT for usenet access. There are plenty of third-party usenet servers still out there.

For the purposes of testing whether or not it is your copy of Thunderbird or a BT transient fault try using the free AIOE news server

nntp.aioe.org port 119

It censors posting to certain UK groups but apart from that it is a usable free standby for when your normal news server is broken.

Odd that you get offered a list of newsgroups but no article headers or bodies. It sounds like their article indexing has gone AWOL.

Incidentally does anyone know how to make TB read from multiple news servers into a single newsbase. That would suit me better.

I changed to a free news provider - or actually two to get all the groups I read. Eternal September and aioe. Did this when my previous ISP withdrew free news supply. I'm now with BT and didn't bother changing the news supplier to them, as the old ones still worked with no alterations.

Just because you use BT for phone access doesn't mean you have to use BT for internet access. There are plenty of third-party internet providers out there.

s lists of newsgroups .. but although I can subscribe to uk.d-i-y I can' t download any threads ... it asks me do I want to download, but nothing ar rives and eventually I get a timed out failure.

Been told by BR support that BT does not update its IP range to the newserv er ...and you often get assigned an IP address that teh server does not rec ognise. Need to reboot ... and keep rebooting router until you get an IP address th at will work. I'll try one of the others mentioned ..didn't know they would work via BT c onnection

Just because you use BT for phone access does not mean you have to. There are plenty of vendors doing deals on phone and internet packages, and many of them are better than BT

;-)

Try one of the third party servers:

I expect that would be quite difficult since the article identities are generated by the server in question and are not "global". Hence it would be difficult to reliably spot which articles are duplicates from another server.

OK ... tried nntp.aioe.org

Downloaded groups about 10 times faster than BT so that side looks promising ... but again once groups list downloaded, I choose to subscribe.. Subscribed groups show under AOIE but when I click on them ... same, says its connecting but nothing received and after several minutes .. times out.

Seems like I have a TB issue .. anybody any clues (email working fine)

That's a possibility, as would be either some form or firewall (local or remote), or traffic shaping carried out by the ISP.

Sorry, should have added this to the last post...

To eliminate TB from the enquiry, try reading an article manually.

You will need telnet installed (which by default its not on recent windows boxes - but you can add it from the "programs and features" control panel app).

Type:

telnet your.news.server.here 119

You should get a a "200" response with the name of the server

Then type

MODE READER

You should get:

Then do:

GROUP uk.d-i-y

You should get a response like:

The numbers you get will differ - but take the last one in the list since it will be the most recent post. Type:

The server should then respond with the full text of the article. If that works then suspect there is something up with you copy of TB. If it fails then look for another cause.

I'm with Zen, but they stopped their usenet server in August.

Why not use a third party server that works? Brian

If you don't want binaries then eternal september is OK. Brian

Weird. Pluto/Newshound the newsreader and fetcher on this ancient Acorn machine does just that as I needed both Eternal September and aioe to access all the groups I subscribe to. And if one is down it just uses the other. Seamlessly.