Microsoft Exchange and other Usenet news servers

Usenet News Servers

	As part of their one-program-to-perform-every-task philosophy, Microsoft has included a service for Usenet Newsgroups in Internet Information Server. But you have to look pretty far into the documentation to find it, because it's obviously not something they care too much about; it's checklistware, included so no one can say "but then we couldn't run News" in protest of a switch to NT and IIS instead of another web server. If you really care about running a Usenet server at your site, you'll be better off using software that's written specifically to handle it.
	NetWin named DNews to suggest that it should replace the old C News server (the successor to B News). It's a commercial product, but it's a good choice for sites on a budget because it makes much more efficient use of disk space and bandwidth than a traditional server, by requesting and storing only the newsgroups its users are reading, rather than asking its feeder site to send it everything. It's available for Windows (95 and up), nearly any Unix-like system, VMS, and OS/2, and even the configuration and data files are portable from one to another (I've done it.) A simple web-based news-reader toolkit is included in the standard package, with a more powerful one available separately.
	INN (InterNetNews) is the more legitimate successor to C News, as a full-featured, free, open-source NNTP server. It's currently developed by the Internet Software Consortium (the same folks who handle the standard-setting DNS server BIND), which provides some assurance of both its quality and its future. Its article-storage mechanism was overhauled several releases ago to better handle the huge modern volume of Usenet articles. For Unix-like systems.
	Highwinds offers the commercial Typhoon server and Cyclone news router for "carrier-class" systems, and Twister to add web-based discussion capabilities. They boast some of the largest Usenet sites (including the unnamed #1). Available for a handful of Unix-like systems.
Side note: SpamHippo is a free utility that removes spam from either INN or Highwinds news servers.
	CoffeeLink is built for discussion groups within an organisation (such as a business or a web site), rather than being part of the larger Usenet network. It doesn't exchange articles with other sites, but you can use any standard newsreader with it. It's written entirely in Java, which means it will run on any server for which a Java Virtual Machine is available (which is most of them), and it's easy to set up and to run. It's now available free of charge as an open-source system.
	Inframail is a combination mail/web/ftp/news/gopher server, available in different versions with varying capabilities, all of them inexpensive. Although it won't beat any of the "best of breed" dedicated applications, it does surprisingly much (e.g. supporting IMAP, ESMTP, and SSL). For both Windows and Unix-like systems.
	Leafnode is news server designed for small sites. (The name refers to the position of such a system on the news-distribution "tree": at the end of a branch.) Its news-fetching module gets articles only for those newsgroups which have recently been accessed (much like DNews), so it can work effectively with little storage space over a slow network connection. After the original author stopped developing Leafnode, another developer picked it up and began developing Leafnode+. Another developer later went back and picked up where the last version of Leafnode proper left off, so there are now two variants to choose from. Both are designed for Unix-like systems.
	RumorMill is a shareware news server for Mac systems (even a lowly 68K machine, and any reasonably recent version of the OS, so it's not just for OS X machines), designed to handle a relatively small number of newsgroups (i.e. not a full feed). It does this using a "sucking" feed which collects only those newsgroups in active use on the site. It's not the most feature-rich, but it's inexpensive and has the most-needed security and administration capabilities.
	Hamster Playground is a handy little open-source (written in Delphi) server for Windows that can collect news messages and e-mails from other servers, then serve them to local news/e-mail clients. This enables you to host your own discussion groups on your local network, in addition to providing off-line access to selected newsgroups from one or more ISPs.
	Tortoise is a complete News server built on top of the open-source News transport server NNTPRelay. Although its documentation and support is a bit spartan, and development has apparently stalled, this is a solid, free option for NT/2000 systems.