basics about env variables

[Robert.Land@t-online.de (Robert Land)]

The slrnpull program provides the option to
use the env variable NNTPSERVER instead of
passing the newsserver by argument.

As being not that experienced in unix I had
a look at the rcS script to look how this
might be done. 
Following the PATH setting in this file I added
these two lines:

NNTPSERVER=news.btx.dtag.de
export NNTPSERVER

then did a new init and tried a echo $NNTPSERVER
which resulted in a blank line in response.

What was my fault and was this actually slrnpull
required?

Any comments are grately appreciated.

Robert