That's not how newsgroups work. MS servers are not "the source of
everything". It's the "source" only of posts that are made directly
to that server.
Disclaimer: Below I'm not trying for technical accuracy as much as
explaining the gist of what is going on, AFAIK.
When you post, your NNTP-Posting-Host server sends the message to
the server you designate, which assigns a message-ID. That message
is then forwarded to any of a host of other servers.
Likewise, each server may take the feed from one or more other
servers. If the message is a duplicate, the server ignores it,
otherwise it adds it to the store.
Since MS is a hosted newsgroup, many or most newsservers slurp
directly from msnews's output. But they also may slurp from other
servers. Servers have different update periods, varying from minutes
to days, which is why, from time to time, you may see a reply arrive
before the original post (if the original's path to your server is
more convoluted than the replyer's).
The process is also asymmetric within servers, which is why I can
see messages posted to msnews that those trying to read from msnews
can't. I'm not positive what the msnews configuration is, but if
it's typical of other server farms, when you post to msnews, you
connect to a "slave" server. That server then forwards the message
to a central "master" server where the messageID is applied. The
message is the forwarded, or available for slurping, from other
servers. The master then propagates the message to all the slave
servers.
Normally, this posting process is just about instantaneous. The MS
servers now, however, are completely out of sync. Depending on the
number of messages retained, rebuilding the synch tables can take
hours. So for now, if you download the headers from slave1, then try
to retrieve a message, you may end up connecting to slave2 which
hasn't received it yet, and you'll get a "message is no longer on
this server" error. Also, depending on the configuration, messages
posted during the rebuid may be lost or delayed for hours.
You can get a little more consistency if you telnet into a
particular server, instead of using a newsreader. But that doesn't
help if the slaves aren't getting updated.
You can get a lot more consistency if you connect to another server
- I'm using qwest.net right now. Whether you get updated regularly
or not is a matter of how often the server is updated and what other
servers it connects to.
