FWIW, I access news using TB! and MyGate so would see no change or benefit from moving from a ML to NNTP.
You see no benefit since using TB! for news makes you lose all the news specific functionality that you'd have at your disposal if you were to use a specialized client.
If all you wish to do is to manage your e-mail from a single location then IMAP will be of absolutely no benefit to you. You may as well use POP and you'd wonder what's all the hoopla about IMAP.
The same for NNTP. If you wish to download all of a newsgroups posts locally and read them all, then NNTP would be an impediment for you. You'd actually be seeking solutions like MyGate.
Here are some of the features that a specialized news client will offer you. They are especially useful for high traffic discussion lists. This is why most who wish for NNTP support for the list traffic will *always* start by saying that they consider the list traffic too heavy for them in the context of a mailing list.
1. Scoring:
Scoring allows you to group messages with a common characteristic together. Any thread that contains messages with that particular characteristic (a particular string in a header) will be scored accordingly. The threads may then be sorted according to their scores. On a busy day, you may pay attention to only those posts containing messages that score high or those threads which you're watching. They are easily located since they're grouped together.
2. Filters that expire.
Watch or ignore filters are a jiffy in news clients. Just select the thread and select watch or ignore. In TB!, you have to create a filter. Now, you may be watching a thread based on the subject and you may wish to not watch all threads with that subject content forever so you'll need the filter to expire after a while. The same goes for ignore filters.
3. Selective downloading.
You have a lot more control over automated downloading of particular posts. This is far better for slower connections. IOW's you can have your news client download only those posts that interest you and retrieve only the headers for the others.
After a long stint away from the list in which case you'd not have to unsubscribe or change your subscription settings if you're using NNTP, you may have 5000 posts waiting. With NNTP, you can easily download only the last 500 posts or last 1000 or 100. If you're happy, then you can do a catch up operation where you don't have to download the headers for the rest of posts.
These benefits are the ones that come immediately to mind.
There are a few yahoogroups lists that I no longer read since I'm really not interested in most of the traffic and I can't be bothered with downloading all those messages and having to mark most of the threads read etc. just to find the occasional thread that may interest me. This is particularly problematic when I've been away from the list for a while.
NNTP and its benefits could make this a lot easier and I'd still be subscribed to those lists if I could use NNTP to manage their traffic.
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