Yes. In an ideal situation, your news downloading program would ask
the server what new articles it has in a group, by message-ID,
and then ask for only the new articles that it doesn't have. Unfortunately
this only works for server-to-server news transport, and ISPs rarely
offer their users this capability.
> Is the .newsrc file in the yarn/yarn directory the same as the one in my
> shell account home directory?
No!
The one in your %home%\yarn directory is to keep track of the articles
you have read in Yarn, the one in your ~ directory is to keep track
of the articles you have downloaded. Both refer to *their* local
spool - \yarn\news for the first, and your NNTP server's /usr/spool/news
for the last. Article 14 of comp.x.y in your Yarn spool can be
article 45234 of comp.x.y on your NNTP server.
Copying one newsrc to the other location will *greatly* mess things
up.
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