Before I started this thesis, I never even heard of the Usenet , and people told me it was a somewhat outdated computer network mailing technology. However, it works in quite a different way as we are used to with, say, email. And for that reason it is quite an intruiging subject. Email has 2 important limitations as far as group communication is concerned: Each message must be explicitly addressed to a recipient, and each recipient needs a separate copy of the message.
The Usenet however enables you to post a message once to a server. Once posted, everyone connecting to the network can access your message and reply to it.

My 2006 Honours thesis is titled A proposed technique for tracing origin of spam on the Usenet. And the pdf file can be downloaded here (1.5 MB, 92 pages).

The document also contains screenshots of the web application I developed in order to download suspect Usenet articles and analyse their headers, testing for the validity of the path entries.

Here's a simple way to connect to the Usenet - Google has a facility that enables you to read and post from/to the Usenet using the normal WWW channels (instead of having to use news readers that use different channels).

Before you start, realise that the word NEWSGROUP is nothing less than a classification topic, say you may have the newsgroup 'misc.kids.pregnancy' which carries articles posted on the topic of pregnancy... As you may think, the word 'newsgroup' is very misleading.

Here's how to read and post Usenet articles on Google:

1 - Open up Google and click on the link 'GROUPS' (located above the search textfield).

2a - Enter a topic of interest in the search field. A common topic (such as 'Bach') will bring up articles to newsgroups that have the name 'Bach' in them. Say you chose 'Bach': One of the newsgroups is 'alt.music.j-s-bach'. All green links are newsgroups. Click on 'alt.music.j-s-bach' and you'll find the latest articles posted on this newsgroup.

2b - If the topic you entered appears in any newsgroup names, the first link shown will be 'Groups matching <topic name>'. Clicking on this will show you all the newsgroup that carry that name (try 'politics' for example).

3 - If you want to subscribe so you can post articles too, just click 'Subscribe to this group' somewhere near the top. Google will guide you from there on....

Moments after subscribing you can post your own articles by clicking 'Start a new topic' or following up another person's topic by clicking on the article's link and clicking 'reply'.

Realise that your article will be propagated on countless news servers all over the world and will be immortalised for prosperity thanks to engines like Google which keeps a huge database of all articles ever posted on the Usenet.

So there you go, let me know how you went ...