off to my yep, that's what I want to be able to do too. Most of it will be junk, obviously, but at least if I have it locally I only have myself to blame for losing it :) Using that group:xxx search string looks like just the job, should be able to write a client to hook up to the site and pull groups to local storage with that (and keep the threading too hopefully!). Not sure if that could be made compatible with awhatever format stuff's held in on a news server or not, but that'd be nice. Something to look into anyway... cheers Jules --