I’m thinking of setting up a local Discourse instance and importing some Usenet groups into it, just as a matter of having a personal archive of them. I’m not interested in trying to do a two-way mirror, or even necessarily trying to keep up with current topics in those groups (though if it could be readily accomplished I’d be interested in this). What I’m not sure of is how to do it. It looks like I can download messages from some of the groups I’m interested in via Google Groups, though they won’t have full email addresses (I’m not sure if this is going to cause problems in importing the messages)–and some of the other groups just don’t download.
As I think about the question, I realize that I have accounts with a couple of news servers. In principle, it seems it should be pretty straightforward, with the right software, to download all the articles into a .mbox file (or series of files)–but I’m not sure what that software would be. Any suggestions?
Edit: It looks like slrn (specifically, slrnpull) can handle the download, though it looks like each post will be in its own file. But I think the .mbox import script can handle that, albeit with a bit of work on the directory structure.