In article <19970806.135421.24@y0001006.tu-bs.de>, Thomas Boroske wrote:
>Is this a real solution ? I mean, AFAIK, when newsservers talk to each other
>then a different protocol is used compared to simply fetching/posting. 
>So will the newsserver allow it ?

This is rapidly veering away from being relevant to riscbsd, but:

NNTP is the protocol which newsservers use to communicate with each other,
and also which newsreaders use to talk to newsservers (usually anyway, IMAP4
can sort of do that job too).

However, the command sets used are almost entirely separate, and some people
talk about NNRP (the R being for "Read") when refering to the newsreader to
newsserver parts.

For traditional "pushing" newsservers, each server has a list of servers it
feeds news to, and what to feed them.  A "leaf" server will usually only
feed articles which haven't come from it's upstream feed (or feeds).

The way this works is the feeding server says "IHAVE <messageid>" and the
receiving server will check if it has that article, and either ask for it,
or say it already has it.  There's also an "ask me again later" option,
which is sometimes useful.

This can be very efficient, especially if the servers are able to pipeline
requests, but it's generally hard to fiddle with what gets fed.  You can
pick individual groups, or hierarchies (e.g. comp.sys.acorn.*), but you
generally have to get offered all articles in a group (possibly dropping
cross-posts to certain groups).

There's a growing trend to use "pulling" or "sucking" servers, which use the
NNRP set of commands as if they were a newsreader.  They can work better for
a small feed, and can allow a "kill file" to be applied to the overview
information so killed articles are never fetched (I think slrnpull allows
this).

The downside is that a sucking feed puts much more load on the feed server
than a traditional newsfeed.  As a result, they can be unpopular with
newsadmins.  The upside is the newsadmin doesn't have to keep updating the
newsfeed file.

>Otherwise, could you use a mail-to-news gateway ?

Posting directly gives you more confidence that the post has actually made
it onto the server, since any error message will be reported at the time,
rather than mailed to you (if you're lucky, some mail-to-news gateways seem
to just swallow errors).

Cheers,
Olly