LinuxQuestions.org - Scriptable Newsgroup CLI Reader

tin has an automatic / batch mode.
From the man page [tin(1)]:

Quote:

AUTOMATIC MAILING AND SAVING NEW NEWS
tin allows new/unread news articles to be mailed (''-M'' and ''-N'' option) or saved (''-S'' option) in batch mode for later reading. Useful when going on holiday and you don't want to return and find that expire has removed a whole load of unread articles. Best to run via cron(1) everyday while away, after which you will be mailed a report of which articles were mailed/saved from which newsgroups and the total number of articles mailed/saved. Articles are saved in a private news structure under your <savedir> directory (default is ${TIN_HOMEDIR-"$HOME"}/News). Be careful of using this option if you read a lot of groups because you could overflow your file system.
If you only want to save some of your groups use the batch_save tinrc variable. Set to ON or OFF in tinrc to enable/disable saving of all groups and then use the batch_save attribute to fine tune which groups you want to have saved. For example, if you want to save most of your groups, then set batch_save to ON in tinrc and selectively turn off the ones you don't want using attributes.

tin -M iain -c -f newsrc.mail
(mail any unread articles in newsgroups specified in file newsrc.mail to the local user iain and mark them as read)
tin -S -c -f newsrc.save
(save any unread articles in newsgroups specified in file newsrc.save and mark them as read)
tin -R
(read any articles saved by tin -S)