USENET messages are basically email messages with a few extra header lines. They're REALLY easy to deal with, assuming you have the stock transport layer (uucp - "Unix to Unix CP" - networked file copy over serial lines).

My first experience with usenet was... 1989? Via an interactive dial-in system. (Imagine something halfway between a BBS and an internet provider.) But I was running a (very tiny) unix-like system at home, so I wanted my own feed. I had uucp, but none of the readers would compile on my system. (It was Coherent on a 286 PC - which gets around the problem of the 286 not having a proper MMU by limiting processes to 64K code + 64K data, like a PDP-11.)

Anyways, I downloaded a usenet reader, read the source code, and wrote my own. (That was a much smaller project than it sounds: like I said, usenet message format is TRIVIAL.)

Punchline: I'm still using that reader program to read my email. 30+ years later. Ha ha.