[plug] New PLUG news server

[James Devenish]

In article <g3lp22xi3a.ln2 at innovative.iinet.net.au>, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> The method described above provides for downloading of most news
> articles during absence. And a means of providing comfortable
> access.

Put it this way: If I am absent,
 - I expect to be able to put an autoresponder on a server and have the
   autoresponder send out messages promptly as appropriate.
 - I do *not* expect to have to configure a workstation to be powered on
   to dial up periodically to the Internet in my absence, download my
   mail, then send belated autoresponder messages. 
Likewise, I would expect that the news service proceeds merily without
me and that I can `pick up where I left off' at arbitrary times in the
future.

> There are headaches/issues with injecting 5-year-old articles into a
> newsgroup. The server will simply reject the articles if they exceed
> the maximum permissible age for the newsgroups.

That sounds like a particularly artificial barrier.

> Also, for people who have not previously connected, the backlog of
> many thousands of headers will cause significant initial connection
> delays.

What are you talking about? If I connect to news0.optus.net.au, with
hundreds of gigabytes of mail in its spools and tens of thousands of
messages in newsgroups and I wish to read a newsgroup containing tens of
thousands of messages that I have never read before, there is no
problem. My newsreader will simply find out how many messages are in the
group and prompt me for how many I wish to read, or alternatively I can
just choose to ignore all past messages -- it's up to me. No one forces
me to sit in front of a computer reading every single backlogged message
if I don't want to. But I *can* if I want to.