isr.co.ro : glossary Offline News Reader A program that lets you read and reply to Usenet newsgroup postings from a local copy of the newsgroups you've selected, rather than you retrieving each article as you're ready to read it. An offline reader gets incoming messages from a news server on the host machine where you have an account (or from one of the few remaining public news servers) and then stores the messages on a local disk or in memory until you're ready to read each one. If you produce a reply or new article, that's saved in a file on your local system for later uploading to your mailbox host.