If the main reason you access the news is because of the pictures, then this is the place you've been dreaming about. Greta takes the pictures, and decode the binary stuff to a jpg or gif. Then she makes a little thumbnail for each picture, and builds them up into contact sheets of up to thirty per sheet. That gives you an idea of what's in the picture, and it's fast, because she makes those contact sheets very compactly, at less than 1kb per picture.
There are several million pictures on the main server, and another 7.5 million on Older Server Number 1.
You can click on the picture you want to look at, and it will expand to whatever its full size is. Then the back button on your browser, takes you back to the list.
There's also a table, giving information about the picture - its name, file size, width and height in pixels. From that table, you can check the boxes for the pictures you want, and download them all at once as a ZIP file.
Then there's the email address of the person who posted it (or at least, what they gave as their email address). Narella had a good look at that, and if she decided that it's likely to be an invalid address, that's what it says. But if you click on it, you can still try to send email to the address that was given.
Next to that, you can click on "Read" and read the full text of the posting, with the picture in place.
The last thing on the line, is the subject-line of the posting. If Narella has decided that it's a spam, then that subject line will be greyed out (but you can still read it if you want to).
Each day's pictures are sorted. First Narella sorts out the ones she thinks are spam, then she sorts the non-spam into alphabetical order, followed by the spammish ones, sorted also. You can go to any other part for the same day, you can go to other days for the same newsgroup, and you can go to other newsgroups.
If you want to discuss the newsgroups access, have suggestions for existing newsgroups that I should add, want to discuss the way the newsreader works, or anything else to do with this area, I've set up a Message Board for Newsgroup Access.
You can use the whole thing whether you're a member or not, but if you're not a member, you won't be able to read the text, or see the full-size pictures. Maybe you'll decide to become a member.
Because of the nature of Usenet and what's on it, I'm asking you to accept the following terms and conditions as a condition of letting you use it. If you don't accept those conditions, then don't use the service.
Also, you can search the NewsThumbs for a picture by name or subject header. This is useful if you don't know which Newgroup is going to be of interest to you, or if you're trying to locate a picture.
Most of this list of Newsgroups won't interest you, and you don't really want to keep loading a huge page full of non-interesting names. So, I've set up a thing called "Favourite Newsgroups". You choose which ones are your favourites, and Vanessa will remember. Then, each time you ask to see your list of Favourite newsgroups, you'll see a much smaller table of just those. Of course, you can change that list any time.