Yes, it is related to mail, but with open groups. Country to mailing list you have the complete archive. In a way a world readable impact server with append per

Yes, it is related to mail, but with open groups. Country to mailing list you have the complete archive. In a way a world readable impact server with append permissions (well, actually there are ways to pull old messages back etc.) and synchronisation between servers. (Not correct comparison, but maybe helps) The individual messages are also structured like mail using MIME. For what you download in sync depends on your config. alt.binaries is special, I believe relatively young and many providers didn't offer them to begin with ... When fetching you configured your client "please fetch all of comp.lang.cpp" and it would do. I believe you could also say "just give me the headers" and load only selected messages on next sync (i.e. for fetching only binaries from messages with interesting subjects) If your ISP didn't have a server, there were multiple open ones in universities or other ISPs (not all locked down for their customers only but either didn't care or saw it as an ad for them), but they could be far away (modern cross ocean cables are younger ...) and busy/slow. And yes, a server can decide which groups it syncs.