newsd

newsd is a background daemon that reads news articles from news servers and stores them in a local spool directory. It is typically used to manage Usenet news, allowing users to set up an article feed and manage their reading queue. newsd is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the traditional newsreader daemons.

newsd is often used in conjunction with fetchmail, a program that retrieves email from email servers. It acts as a counterpart to fetchmail, fetching new articles from news servers and moving them to the local spool directory. This approach is often preferred to running a traditional newsreader daemon, as it is more efficient and flexible.

News servers most commonly support the NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) and NNTPS (secure version of NNTP) protocols. newsd can connect to these protocols and authenticate using a provided username and password. Once authenticated, newsd can retrieve articles from the news server's index of newsgroups, allowing users to browse and select which groups to receive articles from.

newsd stores articles in INN's standard format, with per-article stats and log data. It also allows the configuration of per-group blacklisting and whitelisting, which can help users control the types of articles they receive. Users often configure newsd along with fetchmail to manage both their email and news feeds. By acting as a background daemon, newsd continues to run and fetch articles in the background, minimizing the amount of system resources consumed.