Setting Up Outlook Express - News

The following is a guide for setting up a text based newsgroupaccount in Outlook express 6 on Windows XP.

1) Open Outlook express.

Click on the Tools menu at the top, then click on Accounts.

2) You will now be presented with the window shown below, displaying the accounts that are set up in Outlook Express at the moment. Click on the News tab, click on the Add button and select News.

3) In the following screen, enter your name and click on Next.

4) In this screen, enter your email address and click on Next.

5) Enter the address for the Claranet news server which is news.clara.net. For customers who have a Claranews account the news server is news.claranews.com. Click on Next to proceed.

Please note: if you are connecting to the Internet using another provider then you are required to tick My News Server Requires Authentication. When you click on "Next", enter your Claranet username and password and you will be able to login to the news server.

6) Click on Finish and you will be returned to the accounts window. Once you click close, Outlook Express will ask you if you would like to download Newsgroups from the account you added.

Click on Yes and Outlook will attempt to connect and retrieve a list of all the newsgroups on the account you have just setup.

This can take a while as the list is quite large.

7) Once the downloading is complete, you will see a window which has a list of all the newsgroups you can subscribe to (in news terms this means you wish to recieve the messages sent to this group, and involves no payment).

To read a group, or look for a particular group, type in part of the name in the window at the top ("Display groups which contain:"). Typing in Clara shows us a list of the different Claranet newsgroups. If we wanted to read claranet.support , we would scroll down, click on claranet.support so that its highlighted then click on Subscribe.

8) Once you have subscribed to the groups you require, click on Ok to be taken back to the main screen. If you then click on the newsgroups you have subscribed to, Outlook will try to download messages sent to that group so you can read them.