This page provides step-by-step instructions for anyone not familiar with the newsreading capabilities of Microsoft's Outlook Express. You are invited to read the entire page, or jump directly to any of the following sections for quick instructions performing the specific task:

Configure your news reader for news.grc.com

Modify your news.grc.com settings

Manage your newsgroup subscriptions

Immediately after subscribing to a group

Your first test posting

Interacting with the newsgroups

In the "Reading Messages" section you should enable the "Automatically download message when viewing in the Preview Pane" option.

In the "News" section you should be sure to enable the "Get xxxx headers at a time" and change the default of 300 to 1000. Once you have subscribed to the newsgroups you wish, the most recent 1000 article headers will be downloaded to give you a nice starting point from which to move forward.

Accept and save these changes by clicking the "OK" button to close the Options dialog . . .

Setting up the GRC "Account"

Outlook Express refers to the process of setting up a relationship with a news server as "creating an account", so that's what we want to do.

Many people will use an address like:

The checkbox "My news server requires me to log on" needs to be checked if you wish to be able to submit your own questions and contribute to our groups. If you only wish to read without contributing you may leave it unchecked.

This passphrase will never appear publicly, but it will securely "authenticate" you to our server. This will enable you to post your own messages into any of our groups, cancel anything you have previously posted at any time for any reason, and prevent anyone from "impersonating you" on our server.

You should also check the "Remember password" checkbox, and you must NOT check the "Log on using Secure Password Authentication (SPA)" checkbox since we use our own secure logon system.

A note about remembering passwords:

Once everything is set correctly, click "OK" to save your changes and close the news.grc.com Properties dialog box. You will be returned to the "Internet Accounts" dialog which you should also close by clicking the "Close" button.

To open the "Newsgroup Subscriptions" dialog (if it's not already being displayed), right-click the mouse on the "news.grc.com" folder in the left-hand pane, then choose the "Newsgroups..." selection from the pop-up menu . . .

 If newsgroup descriptions are not displayed you may enable them as explained above then click the "Reset List" button on the Newsgroup Subscriptions dialog above to update the newsgroup display.

 Since we add and remove newsgroups from time to time, it's always best to start off by "Resetting" the newsgroup list. Click the "Reset List" button to retrieve the current newsgroup list from the news.grc.com server. Please note that the list will be changing and it will probably NOT appear exactly like the one shown above.

 With the "All" tab chosen, you will be presented with a list of the newsgroups available from our server. The descriptions to the left repeat and summarize the detailed descriptions provided on our "Discussions Quick Reference" page.

 Choose which newsgroups you wish to monitor and "subscribe to" by double-clicking the newsgroup's line, or by highlighting the line with a single-click then clicking on the "Subscribe" or "Unsubscribe" buttons to the right of the newsgroup list. Subscribed newsgroups are shown with the distinctive folder icon which you can see in front of four of the newsgroup names above. You can also select multiple newsgroups at once by holding down the "CTRL" key for toggling the selection or the "SHIFT" key for selecting a range of groups.

 Your newsgroup subscription choices may be freely changed at any time. So don't worry about needing to make all of the right decisions the first time. You can easily change your mind by returning to this dialog and double-clicking any newsgroup name.

 With the GRC news server selected in the left hand pane (the hierarchical tree view) click the large "Synchronize Account" button at the top left of the right hand pane . . .

Outlook Express will connect to our server and update the article counts for every subscribed group. Click "OK" on the pop-up complaint about there being nothing to synchronize — that's exactly what we want for now.

 Now, in the left hand pane click once on each GRC newsgroup name to select it. Each time you do, the most recent 1000 message headers (assuming you changed the default from 300 to 1000 at the top of this page) will be downloaded into your news reader. Wait for the download to complete while watching the status line at the lower left. Step through each newsgroup, selecting the group and downloading the most recent messages.

 After briefly viewing each group and downloading the most recent 1000 headers, right click on each group in the right hand pane and set its synchronization setting to "Headers Only". This will cause Outlook Express to check each subscribed group and download any new article headers . . .

PLEASE restrain your experiments to the grc.test newsgroup to keep the other groups clear of extraneous postings. We will immediately remove "debris" postings from the other groups, and you won't be making a great first impression if you post tests other than in grc.test.

This is also a perfect place to experiment with cancelling your own articles, which is something we all need to do from time to time.

 When you click the "Synchronize Account" button or select an individual newsgroup your newsreader will retrieve updated message counts from the news.grc.com server and display the count of unread newsgroup messages for each newsgroup.

 At this point interacting with the newsgroups will be very reminiscent of eMail: When a "folder" (newsgroup) is chosen from the pane on the left the message subjects and other information is shown in the pane on the upper-right. When individual messages are selected the newsreader will retrieve that message and display it in the lower-right pane.

 Note that it may be more useful to show message size as a line count than in "k bytes". To change this, right-click the column headers and choose "columns..." from the pop-up menu. Turn off the check mark in front of "Size" and turn on the check mark in front of "Lines". After you have made any changes you desire, click "OK" to close the dialog and show the new column headers.

 Messages that have been replied to will show a [+] which you can click to "open" and see the message's discussion thread. Clicking individual message subjects will pull successive messages from the server to display the messages.

 You should not feel overwhelmed by the number of "unread" messages. Unlike eMail, where every message is uniquely addressed to you, it is unlikely that you will, or should, ever be interested in reading every message. And some of our groups are extremely high-traffic. Any time things get away from you, you can right-click on the newsgroup folder in the left pane and select "catchup" (just as you did initially when you needed to be "forgiven" for not reading the first 120,000 articles in the grc.techtalk (or other) group). This will mark all previously downloaded headers as if you had already read them. In this way any new messages — posted after you "caught up" — will be marked as unread and you can follow the various conversations forward.

 Also unlike eMail, you do not need to explicitly delete messages you have read and, in fact, there's no way to do so! The standard settings automatically delete any message five days after it is downloaded, so the system maintains itself without you needing to delete messages you have read.

 Now that you have some sense for the way this all works you might want to re-open the "Options" dialog and browse through the various tabs. You'll probably find a few things you want to change. To open the Options dialog select "Tools / Options..." from the main menu.