Soon after starting UsenetExpress we were asked if we could implement the ability for end users to post old(er) articles that were not on our new spools. The original poster of the articles wanted to “repost” them using the same message-ids so that they didn’t take up twice the space on providers that already had the articles from the original post. Since the POST NNTP command limits how old the Date: header can be it wouldn’t allow them to post with the original headers. After mulling over possible solutions we decided to implement IHAVE at the end user level.

IHAVE has historically been used by usenet backbones to exchange articles. As the usenet feed volume grew over the years it has mostly been replaced with CHECK/TAKETHIS. Repurposing IHAVE seemed like an elegant solution that has been working well for a few years. It was recently brought to our attention that we never publicly announced the feature. A news reader/client developer noticed it listed in our NNTP ‘HELP’ output while debugging their application. After we explained it’s use case they were pretty excited about the possibilities and mentioned we should consider making it more well known. We’ll release some example code over the next few weeks to give a better technical example. If you’re a developer and would like more information sooner, feel free to shoot support a quick email.