Setting up Thunderbird for UW newsgroup

Chris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:58:02 +0000

Long story short, back in CS 241 and 251 I was using google groups to access the newsgroup from waterloo. (uw.cs.cs241/251). However, searching for cs350 on google doesn’t do the trick and I was forced to setup a newsgroup client to serve my purpose. During my adventure, I stumbled upon this website from loo and basically they ask you to setup putty as a tunnel so that your thunderbird can pass thru this tunnel and grap the threads from the newsgroup. Of course, this is not a very smart thing to do because you need to fire putty up every single time and I don’t think that’s feasible for anyone who goes on to the newsgroup on an hourly basis.

Here’s my solution.

Follow the Configuring Thunderbird tutorial to the point where you enter name of the news server. Put “news.uwaterloo.ca” instead of “localhost”. (localhost is a unique keyword which means looking for on itself, since the tutorial uses putty to establish a connection to the server, pointing thunderbird to “itself” will utilize that connection and allows you to fetch stuff thru the tunnel).

After you’re done there should be a subscribe window pops up and asks you to subscribe certain group. In our case, we want uw.cs.cs350. Click done and you’re good to go. In case it’s not working, you can always verify it from thunderbird -> Tools -> Account Settings -> Your Account Name -> Server Settings and make sure Server Name is “news.uwaterloo.ca” and the Port is 119.

P.S. I found using the thread tool very useful to follow a long discussion. You can do that by clicking on the top-left button in your thread view.

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Setting up Thunderbird for UW newsgroup