Microsoft's Outlook Express is included with every copy of Windows (in Windows 95 and NT 4, it was called Internet Mail and News). Netscape's Messenger is part of the free Communicator 4.7 package; Forte's Free Agent is another free download. Forte's $US29 Agent 1.8 is identical to Free Agent in the newsreading department, but it adds e-mail support (you can visit the vendor's Web site at www.forte.com).

Like Internet e-mail systems, NNTP servers handle text data only, and they provide no mechanism for transferring file attachments. So how do they manage to serve up full-length movies? As with e-mail, the secret is to encode binary, or nontext, data files into long streams of characters that can be posted as standard text messages. For convenience, large files are often divided into multiple messages, which increases the likelihood that the entire file will survive the vicissitudes of the Net. To get the encoded material onto your hard disk, download the messages to your newsreader, merge them into a single file (if they've been split into multiple messages), and then decode them to re-create the original file. To handle message attachments that end with .rar, .r00, .r01, .r02, or a similar extension, check out our "Download of the Month," WinRAR.

Each of the three newsreaders mentioned above accomplishes the encoding and decoding without additional software, but each uses a slightly different process.

Forte's Free Agent/Agent 1.8: To download a message while you're connected to a news server, simply select the message and press <Enter>. Alternatively, you can mark multiple messages for retrieval by holding down <Ctrl> while selecting them. Next, right-click one of the selected files and choose Mark for Retrieval. To retrieve all of the messages you just marked, choose OnlineòGet Marked Messages.

Once you've downloaded a message, a yellow icon will appear next to its subject line. Usually, Free Agent joins multipart messages automatically so they become a single message, but it can't do this if the messages are out of order, incomplete, or otherwise not what the program expects to see. In most cases, this situation is obvious: Instead of seeing one message with a large attachment, you see a series of messages whose subject lines are identical except for the sequential numbering at the end (see FIGURE 1).

To join multipart messages manually, select the messages you want to connect, choose MessageòJoin Sections, put the sections in the correct order (if necessary) using the Up and Down buttons, and click Join.

To save the joined file attachments to your hard disk, right-click one or more messages with downloaded attachments and choose Save All Attachments. Free Agent saves files by default to the \Agent\Data\temp folder on the drive where the program is installed. Once Free Agent has saved the files (which the program signifies by changing its attachment icon from yellow to green), remove them from the newsreader by right-clicking the message and choosing Delete Body.

Outlook Express: Microsoft's newsreader is nearly as slick as Forte's. If you're online, simply selecting a message triggers Outlook Express to download it. To mark messages for later download, first choose FileòWork Offline to switch to offline mode Select the messages by holding down <Shift> (to choose all files to that point) or <Ctrl> (to choose files one at a time) while clicking on them. Right-click the selected messages, and then choose Download Message Later. To download the marked messages, choose ToolsòSynchronize Newsgroup, make sure that the Get messages marked for download box is checked, and then click OK (see FIGURE 2).

Once you've downloaded all the message parts of a file, select them, right-click the selection, and choose Combine and Decode. As with Free Agent, you'll have a chance to rearrange the order of sections before Outlook Express joins and decodes them. Finally, Outlook Express will present you with the newsgroup message in its own window, with the joined and decoded file attachment listed. To save it to your hard disk, choose FileòSave Attachments, type the path name (or browse to and select the folder you'd like to save the file in), and click the Save button.

Netscape Messenger: The least automated of the three readers is clearly Netscape Messenger. Unless you're dead set against working with either of the other two, don't use Messenger to download binary files. Messenger does let you work offline, but you can't mark individual messages for later download, and it has no way to save file attachments directly from Messenger to your hard disk. You can open attachments in their associated applications, however. To do this, download the message containing the first section of the encoded file (usually labeled "1 of xx" or "1/xx," where xx is the total number of sections), and then click the link to the attachment. Messenger will download the remaining sections (even if you've already downloaded them) and open the attachment. Make sure that the application in which the file opens allows you to save the file to disk.