I use the different newsgroups a lots from Outlooks Express(Charter.Net) are
they protected from Viruses the same as E-Mail.

Not generally, but that may depend on your ISP and the type of newsgroups
you frequent.

If you only need text based groups, www.individual.net (run by a
university in Germany) are very good - and free. Binaries are not allowed
on their network, so you`d be pretty damn safe on there :-)

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