Short:   NNTP client for AS225, polls server and makes a News batchfile
Author:  Michael van Elst (mlelstv@serpens.rhein.de)

nntpget is a NNTP (Net News Transfer Protocol) client that gathers news
articles from a remote NNTP server. It was written for AS225R2 but seems
to work fine with AmiTCP and the faked socket.library done by Henning
Schmiedehausen (also on Aminet).

What would you do when you do not have a working NNTP daemon or do not
want to run (and let it write to disk) all the time ?

My solution is nntpget, a program that talks with a remote NNTP server
using the 'newnews' and 'article' commands to query for new articles
since a specific date and then to retrieve these articles. nntpget
generates a valid batchfile suitable for 'rnews' or the like (i.e.
including the #! rnews xxxx headers).

Usage:

> nntpget ?
FROM/M,SUBSCRIPTIONS/K,ARTICLES/K,SINCE/K,TO/A/K,APPEND/S,NNTPSERVER/K/A,CPS/K/N: 

  FROM             multiple strings denoting newsgroups or complete hierarchies
                   like:   FROM de.test  alt.*  news.announce
  
  SUBSCRIPTIONS    file with list of newsgroups or hierarchies, one per line

  ARTICLES         file with list of MsgIDs, one per line

you can use all 3 sources at the same time. nntpget will first work on FROM,
then on SUBSCRIPTIONS then on ARTICLES.

  SINCE date       fetch only articles since given date in AmigaDOS format
                   substitutes like 'monday' or 'yesterday' are valid meaning
                   the last such weekday (at current time). So yesterday says
                   to retrieve news from the last 24 hours.
                   If you tell it the current day or 'today' this says to fetch
                   all articles since this day at midnight.
                   You can also specify a time meaning since today (or yesterday
                   if the time would be in the future) at that time.

                   If you do not use the SINCE parameter the newserver is told
                   to retrieve articles since 1.1.1900 (i.e. since ever). Some
                   servers may interpret this as 1.1.2000 instead and won't send
                   anything for a while.

  TO file          generated batch file

  APPEND           append to batch file

  NNTPSERVER       the name or IP number of your NNTP server machine

  CPS num          bandwidth limitation. nntpget tries to keep traffic below
                   the given characters per second. This can only be an average
                   since there are bursts of at least one TCP segment which
                   are under control of the TCP protocol stack.
                   The bandwidth is just limited for article transfers and not
                   for the initial transfer of article MsgIDs but which is short.

nntpget uses 2 temporary files in T:. One to gather all MsgIDs, one for the
current article (it cannot write directly to the batchfile since it doesn't know
the size at that time which has to go to the #! rnews header). So please have
enough space on that filesystem (usually T: is on RAM:).

While running nntpget will show you (part of) the NNTP traffic on stdout as well
as the average transfer rate.

I hope this program is useful for someone else.

Michael van Elst