Some of the newsgroups are strictly local and are not sent outside the Institute. Several news reader programs are available. If you are using a workstation, try xrn or xvnews. Do not use vn the first time you read news. Regardless of which news reader you choose, the software will keep track of which news items you have read and to which groups you subscribe.
News readers maintain their information in an initialization file called .newsrc .
Figure 8.4 shows a few lines from a sample .newsrc file. Each group name ends in either a colon or an exclamation point. A colon means that you subscribe to that group, an exclamation point means that you want to ignore that group. The numbers at the end of the line gives the range of message numbers that you have already read. To avoid this problem, start with a single newsgroup, and then edit the .newsrc file to change selected colons to exclamation points.