Traditional mailing lists have several drawbacks. Members must subscribe to each list and a mailing list application (e.g.: the legendary majordomo) resends all posts to every member and keeps one more message in the list archive. This process lavishes bandwidth, time and storage space.

The solution is NNTP and USENET. Articles are stored in a central news server in Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages format. The central article repository (technically a spool) on a receiving host allows the readers to select the desired article and read it, or post a message to a USENET group. The client selects the article to read and the server presents it without duplicating it.

News clients usually connect to intermediate ("slave") servers or directly to the main repository. When a client sends a message to a newsgroup, a slave server receives the message and forwards it to the other servers.