I had thought that NNTP for Usenet and the like was long dead, but I learned today that it's not, at least for reading mailing list archives/traffic.
Maybe I am the last to learn this, but it may be useful to others... If you have an NNTP client or an NNTP facility in Sylpheed, Claws Mail, Thunderbird or similar, it's possible to monitor via NNTP most of the lists here like misc, ports, bugs and others. The NNTP server I stumbled on is at: news.gmane.io [email protected] is listed as gmane.os.openbsd.misc, for example. it's operated by the originator of gmane.org, who apparently lost control of that domain some time back. By default on the clients I have tried, only the last 300 message headers are downloaded, which is reasonable to keep disk space and server load down. A sane checking interval (1h?) allows new traffic to be seen, and it's easy to filter the list. For full archive searches there are still the various web interfaces to the archives, but for recent stuff, I find this method handy. Maybe there are other servers offering this facility too? -- Chris Billington
