Free news servers

The open-server years

For most of the 1990s a news server was part of the standard furniture of a network. Internet providers ran one because customers expected it; universities ran one because Usenet had grown up on their machines; sizeable companies ran one because the software shipped with the operating system and somebody turned it on. A good many of these servers were configured the way the era configured everything — permissively — and would answer any client that connected to port 119 and spoke NNTP. This was rarely deliberate generosity. It was the default, on a network whose trust model still assumed that strangers were probably colleagues.

Open servers were plentiful but perishable, which is why the hand-tested list became a genre of its own. An address that worked in March might be firewalled by May, so a conscientious list-keeper connected to each server in turn, counted the groups it carried, checked whether it accepted postings as well as reading, noted how quickly it answered — and then did it all again the next month. Dedicated sites automated the scanning and ranked the survivors; forum threads, including some that still link to this page, traded addresses the way earlier generations traded shortwave frequencies. There was even an etiquette: do not hammer a slow server, and do not broadcast the address of a university machine that was plainly open by accident. It was observed about as well as etiquette usually is.

Why the doors closed

Spam ended the innocence first. The 1994 green-card advertisement that Canter and Siegel posted across thousands of groups is the conventional start date for commercial Usenet spam, and open servers made the flood easy: anyone could inject articles with no account, no identity and no comeback. Open news servers went the way of open mail relays, and for the same reason — each publicised address was abused until its operator closed it, restricted it to local users, or switched the machine off.

Cost did the rest. Binary groups grew from a sideline into the overwhelming bulk of the traffic, and a full feed that had once fitted down a modem line swelled to terabytes a day. An open server carrying binaries was, in effect, donating a file-distribution network to strangers; text was cheap to serve, but nobody's budget survived the alt.binaries hierarchy.

So providers dropped binaries first, then Usenet itself. AOL discontinued its newsgroup service in 2005, and a 2008 agreement between large American providers and the New York Attorney General, aimed at abuse in parts of the alt.* hierarchy, gave several of them the occasion to shut their news servers altogether. By the end of that decade the bundled ISP news server — the thing every free-server list had quietly taken for granted — was the exception rather than the rule.

What to expect today

The honest modern summary has three tiers. Free text service survives: the servers listed on this page still welcome readers, and the name of the standard recommendation, Eternal-September, is a joke at the expense of the Eternal September of 1993. What no free server of any longevity carries is binaries; that restraint is precisely what keeps such servers affordable to run, and any that promises otherwise deserves suspicion.

Binaries are a paid product now. Commercial providers such as Giganews, Newshosting and Eweka sell access with retention measured in thousands of days, and several of the larger operations run from the Netherlands. This page does not rank them; it only notes that what the old open-server lists were really hunting for is nowadays bought rather than found.

For the past rather than the present, the archives serve. The Google Groups collection noted above is the old DejaNews archive, reaching back to the early 1980s — though since early 2024 it no longer takes in new Usenet posts. As for the free-server lists themselves: any page of open NNTP addresses you find today is almost certainly a fossil, faithfully mirroring servers that closed twenty years ago. This one at least admits it.