PMDF User's Guide
OpenVMS Edition

If you use the news reading capability in Pine to talk to a NNTP server, then you need to have a NEWSRC. file in the PMDF_INIT: directory, or a newsrc file with a non-default name as selected by your newsrc-path Setup Config option. This file contains the names of news groups you read. Pine updates it when you delete a message in the news group. Deleting a message in news does not really delete it, but simply makes the message unavailable to you when you next read the associated news group. The format of this file is one line per news group, with the lines having the format:

newsgroupname:[message,...]

where message is either a number or a range of numbers (e.g., 1-3 ).