There is a severe problem when using Mozilla Mail and News client (and derivatives such as Thunderbird Mail) - they don't support multiple accounts on the same NNTP server. You know what I mean, right? Yeah, that's about Microsoft private newsgroups. They are using the same news server - privatenews.microsoft.com, while different accounts to manage an access to different newsgroups. One day I found myself struggling with creating 3 accounts on privatenews.microsoft.com. Mozilla seems to be treating news server name as a unique key, so whenever you add another news account, providing already existing news server name - bad and weird things happen. Ooops, new account isn't added and old one is broken. Too bad.
Happily I found the solution. On Windows one can create as many as needed local aliases to an IP address using old good hosts file, living in system32/drivers/etc directory. So all you need is to add an alias to 207.46.130.117 IP (static IP of privatenews.microsoft.com), e.g.:
207.46.130.117 whidbeyThen "whidbey" can be used as full-fledged domain name - you can use it as news server in Mozilla mail to create Whidbey private news account. The only difference between real domain name and an alias is that alias will be resolved to IP locally, while real domain name - on remote DNS. Not bad workaround. May be I'm the last one who found it, abut anyway I just wanted to share this info.
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