database. The overview is a list of the most frequently used headers, and additional information such as article sizes, typically retrieved by the client software using the NNTP command. Overviews make reading a newsgroup faster for both the client and server by eliminating the need to open each individual article to present them in list form.

If non-overview headers are required, such as for when using a kill file, it may still be necessary to use the slower method of reading all the complete article