From Newsgroup: news.software.nntp

Something I've noticed (not that it isn't obvious if you think about it)
is that when sucking articles from another news server, the actual order
of articles in the spool (by article ID) often ends up deviating
significantly from the article posting/date order. This seems especially common for cross-posting articles; the first group sucked might be
entirely in order, assuming they were ordered upstream, but as
crossposts are saved in other groups that haven't been processed yet,
newer articles may end up getting saved before more recent ones in those groups.

I thought perhaps doing something like NEWNEWS * 19700101 000000 might
be useful for getting an initial ordered list that could be worked
through somehow, but the RFC says there is no ordering guaranteed in the result, and indeed, INN returns the NEWNEWS response by group, rather
than going through the history file in order of arrival (which I thought
was interesting, not exactly sure why it does this, though I'm sure
there's a good reason).

Has anyone ever tried to pull articles in a way that they all end up
ordered logically within each group? Or does nobody really care since
article order can vary anyways, and clients are responsible for showing
them in order? Only thing I think would work is either having a server
feed you articles in order somehow, or slave off the upstream's Xref so
that they end up in order, but that has a lot of other limitations. Or
pull all the dates for every article you want to mirror, sort them, and
then request them in that order, which, uh... yikes. Would be nice if
there was a better way.

(Back to a recent discussion about THREAD/SEARCH/SORT, in IMAP, an
online only IMAP client can work around this by explicitly SORTing the
results by date; well, NNTP doesn't have a SORT, so online only NNTP
clients are stuck showing an incoherent article of ordering, at least
for the initially mirrored articles; obviously, subsequently sucked or
fed articles should mostly be in order).
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