Getting Started with Usenet

The main advantage of Usenet over torrent is speed. P2P networks like BitTorrent and depend on peers for download speed and reliability. Usenet, on the other hand, depends largely on the speed of your connection. There's no slow peer connection to choke your downloads.

A basics guide to get started.

You can subscribe at for example: NewsHosting, Giganews, AstraWeb.

News can be read from Thunderbird.

Clients

Sabnzbd.

SABnzbd needs Python. It runs at http://localhost:8080/sabnzbd.

Run with $ sab.

Closing any browser windows/tabs will NOT close SABnzbd.

Pan

For reading news.

Sickbeard

For shows.

You can connect directly to SABnzbd to search for shows and automatically download the file there. You only need the API key and the login from SABnzbd. When setting up at Sick Beard, use your machine ip instead of "localhost".

A nice guide here.

Security

None of those clients are using SSL, so you want to set up stunnel. You can use my guide for this.