Having a new laptop for the first time in years, is there a way to sync the state of Usenapp's 'read messages' between two Macs? I'm not worried about anything else, although an option to sync killfile rules would be nice.
Syncing between two Macs?
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Synchronisation between the two is not possible.
What you can do is copy the entire configuration from the old to the new system.
That would be a good starting point.
1) Close Usenapp on both Macs.
2) Open Finder and go to “/Users/{username}/Library/Application Support/Usenapp” and copy all files and folders into the same folder on your second Mac.
3) You might be asked to re-enter your license key on the second Mac.
Yes, the config, history etc came across from my user account migration. But now it's on two macs, so I get to read things twice...
Back in Ye Olde Days of text terminal based Usenet readers, most of them (nn, rn, tin, alpine and so on) would maintain a .newsrc file which had your subscriptions and a list of which messageIDs had been read, which could be used by any newsreader. Optionally having such a file up in iCloud would be awfully nice for those of us using text newsgroups, it would be rather unwieldy for binary. But you could choose to include only the groups that the user wants to be synced.
According to https://www.opennet.ru/docs/FAQ/soft/newsreaders/nn-getting-started.html it looks like this:
Date: 05 May 1995 04:32:00 GMT
Subject: ... ... 4.3.2 Your .newsrc File
Your .newsrc file, which resides in your home directory (~), is used
by most Unix newsreaders, including nn, to keep track of what
newsgroups you are subscribed to and what articles you've read.
Lines in the .newsrc file look like this:
group1.name: m-n,p-q
group2.name!
A colon (:) after the newsgroup name means you are subscribed and a
exclamation point (!) means you are unsubscribed. The numbers are
articles, or ranges of articles, that you've read.(I'll buy another couple of licenses for this feature 
)
I think that maintaining such a file has a significant effect on performance.
Every time you read an article the file would be updated.
Suppose you are subscribed to 100 newsgroups and each newsgroup has a million articles that you have not deleted. Then changing such a file is almost impossible. Okay, a continuous range of articles that have been read does not take up much space, but if there are a lot of gaps between the articles that have been read, this file becomes quite large.
I'll look at it in time and see what's possible.
It was definitely from days before million-message newsgroups.
Restricting it to off by default (like "download all messages" is) and only sync on groups enabled by the user, with a "don't use this on binary groups, that's silly" prompt perhaps.
Or have it only sync status of the most recent 1000 messages in a subscription. That would be plenty.
Only need to update the file when you leave a group, or the autorefresh hits.
I appear to be in feature-design mode, sorry!
It's nice with a handful of subscriptions and messages, but quickly hits its limit.
In addition, Usenapp uses many databases that are mutually linked to guarantee speed. If a separate file has to be kept maintained, it doesn't get any easier. I will see if the database files can be synced via icloud. But don't expect too much from this.
9 days later
- Edited
I was hoping to restrict the scope on this feature to "just small text newsgroups" to reduce the effort enough to make it possible 
Syncing binary groups would definitely be a nightmare and would need to be Done Properly if it were to be done at all. Thanks for considering it!
7 months later
Belatedly, can I +1 this? I’m just trying Newstap on iOS, which will sync a .newsrc file, and it would be really nice if Usenapp did too!
I’ll work on this later and see what’s possible.