usenet in an IMAP style?

[R D S]

Is it possible to synchronise usenet across several computers? In the sort of way that IMAP does for email.

Or would a web client be necessary?

[John Williamson]

That's the easiest way, but you may need some way to synchronise the details of the article numbers you've read, depending on the news server you're using.

Otherwise, it can be done, but it depends on your newsreader how you do it. Generally, it involves copying files from one computer to the other, or using a portable version on a thumb drive.

[Huge]

Why not just mount the ~/.newsrc (or equivalent) file on a shared resource somewhere?

[John Williamson]

That's the easy way if they're all on the same network, and I've even done it across a combined Windows/ Linux network. It could be a problem if the OP wants to have a number of computers all accessing news at the same time, all updating the same ~/.newsrc file, though.

[John Rumm]

I do it with thunderbird on several machines. The profile folder on a shared drive on the NAS. There is a limitation that you can only have one client running at a time though. That can be on the lan or via a VPN if I really wanted.

[Andrew May]

I wonder if that would work with something like Dropbox or would it require the transfer of a multi-megabyte file every time you read a post?

Andrew

[Huge]

.newsrc is only about [tap, tap] 171kB for ~1600 newsgroups. It only contains the names of the groups and the article numbers read.

[John Rumm]

Looking at my news folder, the index file for uk.d-i-y is about 5MB in total... so probably not too difficult if you don't archive messages locally.

[Theo Markettos]

I can and do access Usenet from anywhere, including my phone, by SSHing into a Linux box and running tin inside a tmux (or GNU screen) terminal session. Accessing at the same time is no problem - the display and cursor are synchronised between machines.

Obviously this is a terminal program, so it's keyboard rather than mouse driven (it's usable but not great on a touchscreen phone, for example). But it works and it's bomb-proof - SSH is available on almost all platforms, and it's also very low bandwidth (but not great with high latency networks).

A GUI version of the same would be to run a normal Windows/X/whatever newsreader in a VNC session.

Not really IMAP-style, though.

Theo