Q2 said:
If you want a free service and don't mind a slow connection and monthly download limit of 25GB then check out
XS Usenet.
(ADDED 7/30/2012: Free accounts at XS Usenet have 10-day retention. This means you can only download files posted within the last ten days. Premium accounts have a 900-day retention.) .
Q2
Just an update on XS Usenet.
I think they changed their policy, The speed limit is now 1 Mbit, there is no data download limit.
https://www.xsusenet.com/sign-up/
To get over the speed limit, if you have multiple email accounts (easy to setup on gmail, yahoo etc) you can have multiple Xs usenet accounts and use them all in SABnzbd. Set them up on different server ports just in case one server port is overloaded (they have 8 ports available for the free accounts)
I have 4 accounts setup and I am downloading at my maximum bandwidth.
Although they say that retention is 10 days, I downloaded stuff older the 700 days (l8wrtr ep_1) without any problems (episode 2 & 3 are 139 days old) also no problem.
Edit:
I am now downloading The Book of Eli (800 days old) going well
About SABnzb:
For those who don't like the web interface of SAB or are confused by it, there is a GUI front end called "nzb download deluxe" also open soruce and available from:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nzbdd/
Also I would like to point out an alternative to SABnzbd for those who are having problems, NZBGet is also open source written in C++, cross platform, highly configurable, portable, can be run as a service or as a demon with a web interface and much lighter on the resources than SAB
You can download it from here:
http://nzbget.net/download
Source code available here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nzbget/
Hope this is useful
Cheers