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In the PC world people often talk about ``offline'' newsreaders. These are thingies that are combined reader/news transport monstrosities. With built-in modem programs. Yecchh!
Of course, us Unix Weenie types of human beans use things like
uucp
and, like, nntpd
and set up proper news and mail
transport things like Ghod intended. And then we just use normal
newsreaders.
However, it can sometimes be convenient to do something a that's a bit easier on the brain if you have a very slow modem, and you're not really that interested in doing things properly.
A file format called SOUP has been developed for transporting news and mail from servers to home machines and back again. It can be a bit fiddly.
First some terminology:
server | This is the machine that is connected to the outside world and where you get news and/or mail from. | ||||
home machine | This is the machine that you want to do the actual reading and responding on. It is typically not connected to the rest of the world in any way. | ||||
packet | Something that contains messages and/or commands. There are two kinds of packets:
|
awk
program), or you
can use Gnus to create the packet with its SOUP commands (O s and/or G s b; and then G s p) (see SOUP Commands).
nnsoup
backend as
the native or secondary server.
So you basically have a bipartite system---you use nnsoup
for
reading and Gnus for packing/sending these SOUP packets.