These lists are pretty useless, as said before, the chance they allow binaries is verry small.
If you find one, the retention will be 1 maybe 3 days, the grouplist wont contain much groups and the speed wont exceed 50kbps, not even talking about retention and completion. Most of them will stop working after a couple of days.
In fact, there is no such thing as a free public (non-isp) newsserver. Settting up such a service costs loads of money. I read a post by a sysop from a usenet provider today, he said he took the nzb indexer (worth 15k$) down because its performance wasnt great.
Your only chance is to find a usenet provider who is testing his service and allows the public to testdrive, if your lucky you can use these for a month.
edit:
Free but limited:
Server: free.yottanews.com
Connections: 1
Username and Password: Signup: http://www.yottanews.com/freeaccount.php
Retention/Completion: good
Speed: 60 kb/ps
Trial:
http://www.hitnews.eu/
2 weeks of free leeching you'll need to signup tho. (use at your own risk)
Tests:
news.easynews.nl (poort 119)
login :
[email protected]
password : beta