Articles are formatted as text messages with a header and a body. Other data can be supplied in the header as necessary to define it. The body carries the text which describes the topic being covered. The body text can be any length, in the form of statement or question, and in some cases have other formats such as graphics included or attached. The ISP news server system receiving the netnews feed, by definition must be a powerful, large hard disk capacity machine.
Most news server are able to handle approximately ten days worth of netnews feeds at a time.
The server hard disks are normally in the multigigabite size to handle all of the Newsgroups individuals want to subscribe to. Even with such large archiving capacity, there is a limit to how long an article may be held. With 38,000 Newsgroups feeding into a news server daily, there is usually a time expiration limit to a particular article, once it is posted. The list is kept current by volunteers and can be obtained from news.announce.newusers for most of us when we first use an application program which reads Netnews. The best method of obtaining the complete list is simply to load and run the application which reads them from the news server.