I found a tool from an outfit called MAPILab that allows you to integrate NNTP newsgroups into outlook. I've been playing with their MAPILab NNTP for a bit now, and while you have to make outlook jump through a bit of hoops to make it behave like a threaded newsreader, hide read msgs, etc, it's pretty nice. I'm not too terribly clear on whether they have built-in purging of messages or not - I turned to the autoarchive tool to do that for me.

I'll post back in a few days after my long-term experiences with it; but I've been looking for a newsreader that integrates with outlook for a long, long while. I can guarantee my PST files will survive a system reset, I can't say that about other newsreaders.

I haven't checked out whether I can plonk someone yet - I don't often use that capability. If nothing else, I could use the Outlook Rules setup to emulate various other newsreader functions; except for combine+decode (which I haven't used since my dial-up BBS days, and even then I did it offline).