Thanks to all who answered my query about possible off-line use of nntpcache. I have been up until now using suck with INN. Normally this works fine. However suck has a few shortcomings: (1) If the remote newsserver is reconfigured and the low/high water mark number change, suck gets totally confused. (2) adding a newsgroup requires adding it to suck and INN separately (3) suck doesn't store a global message-id list, or check INN for headers already accepted. Normally this doesn't matter, but if the configuration files get messed up can lead to duplicate petitions from the remote server. (4) as someone has mentioned, most news admins don't seem to like suck, it seems to be very cpu intensive when requesting data. I don't really need an off-line newsreader. Having INN on my PC solves this problem. There were mentions of other "suck"-type programs, like newsdump and slurp which I have not tried. I would be interested in knowing if these tools are better for the job I have in mind. Finally, I still think that nntpcache "could be" a good substitute for the current combination I am using. If the sort of changes required would be non-trivial, I can understand a reluctance to make the changes. Thanks all for your time. regards, Simon J Mudd Madrid, SPAIN