On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 05:27:41PM +0000, Nick Hilliard wrote:
nntp is a non-scalable protocol which broke under its own weight. Threaded news-readers are a great way of catching up with large mailing lists if you're prepared to put in the effort to create a bidirectional gateway. But that's really a statement that mail readers are usually terrible at handling large threads rather than a statement about nntp as a useful media delivery protocol.
Some mail readers are terrible at that: mutt isn't. And one of the nice things about trn (and I believe slrn, although that's an educated guess, I haven't checked) is that it can save Usenet news articles in Unix mbox format, which means that you can read them with mutt as well. I have trn set up to run via a cron job that executes a script that grabs the appropriate set of newsgroups, spam-filters them, saves what's left to a per-newsgroup mbox file that I can read just like I read this list. Similarly, rss2email saves RSS feeds in Unix mbox format. And one of the *very* nice things about coercing everything into mbox format is that myriad tools existing for sorting, searching, indexing, etc. ---rsk