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#16
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Thunderbird -OT
Frank Slootweg wrote:
VanguardLH wrote: Ken Springer wrote: VanguardLH wrote: At best, and if Thunderbird supports it, an article that you read in one newsgroup could be marked as read when you visit another newsgroup to which the article was cross-posted. That used to work, years ago, is my understanding. But Mozilla either broke it or deleted the functionality. I don't know which. Keeping a local cache of all MIDs ever retrieved, so the list could be checked for when you decided to read an article (mark it as read) and flag it in the list to then scan the MIDs in every other newsgroup you visit to check for the flag is a lot of overhead. It's a trivial task, that's why most newsreaders have this functionality. Why is it trivial? Because your News server adds its article numbers (note: article numbers, *not* message-ids (MIDs)) to the 'Xref:' header it generates and puts in the local (server) copy of the article. Example: Xref: uni-berlin.de alt.comp.os.windows-10:105943 alt.comp.freewa951278 So when your newsreader notices you've read the article in one of the groups, it will mark all the article numbers (105943 and 951278 in the example) as read. (When you 'leave' a group, the article numbers of read articles are updated in your '.newsrc' file (or equivalent).) So your newsreader does not have to keep "a local cache of all MIDs ever retrieved". It just has to process the article numbers which are readily available in the 'Xref:' header of the very article it's currently processing. Just check any crossposted article and you'll see the groupnames and your server's article numbers in the 'Xref:' which your server generated/added. N.B. Article numbers are server-specific and the 'Xref:' header is one of the few headers a News server is allowed to change (in transit from one server to the next). If it is so trivial to code, why hasn't it appeared in 20 years? Mozilla Dev obviously never bothered with the requested feature. Apparently the volunteer community isn't addressing the old tickets, either. Thunderbird is sensitive to where is the newsrc file. From bug ticket https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99238, still listed with New status (i.e., not resolved) after 18 years, moving the newsrc file somehow disconnects Thunderbird from knowing which newsgroups to which it was subscribed under an account. Thunderbird sometimes corrupts the newsrc file (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=403200, 12 years old). Aren't newsrc files just text files? That means having to open then and parse each line to scan for article numbers. That's very slow. If you subscribe to just a few newsgroups, probably not a noticeable performance impact. If you subscribe to a few hundred, yeah, all that lookup will be slow. Isn't there a newsrc file for every subscribed newsgroup? When selecting a newsgroup to download, each article retrieve would have its ID search in all the newsrc files for every other subscribed newsgroup. When you subscribe, and when retrieving all new messages (which would be ALL of them), that would require the article lookup across all the other newsrc files. If there is just one newsrc per account (i.e., per server) which tracks all messages across all subscribed newsgroups, that would be less files to parse and scan. I don't use newsgroups from a *NIX host, so I've not been acquainted with newsrc files or how their contents are structured, and I didn't have to deal with them with Thunderbird on Windows. On searching, all the online article talk about how to use tools to tidy up or modify the newsrc files or how to use them for configuration, but I've not found one that delves into the content or structure of one. Can Notepad or gvim be used to edit a newsrc file? If I were still using Thunderbird, I would hope newsrc files are databases and not text files. If all articles ever retrieved for a subscribed newsgroup on a server were stored in a newsrc file, and since some newsgroups have MANY thousands of article depending on the retention of the server, that's a lot or records to store in a text file to then parse every line to scan for a matching article ID. Seems odd that Thunderbird uses SQLite for some of its databases but doesn't embrace Sqlite for all its databases (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_...-_Thunderbird). Article IDs are unique per server. Only the MID value remains the same as the article gets peered across servers (barring MID collisions). You mentioned the Xref header has the article's ID number, but it also specifies the server from which the article was retrieved. The same article on a different server would have a different article ID. A user might subscribe to a newsgroup on more than one server: a cross-posted article could be one one server in one newsgroup but the user looks at the copy on a different server in the other cross-posted newsgroup. The Xref you see would be for the server you used for a subscribed newsgroup to retrieve a copy of a message. In the cross-posted newsgroup where you retrieved the message from a different server, that other server's article number would be different. You'd see one message with its Xref showing server, newsgroup, and article number but the cross-posted copy that got peered to the other server would show other server, cross-posted newsgroup, and different article number. Seems the lookup to establish the same state (i.e., read) across cross-posted newsgroups would only work within the confines of subscribing to newsgroups on the same server. When peering an article across servers, I thought only the MID value was retained. Seem the Xref header MUST be changed by the server when an article is peered to it. The peered-to server would assign its own article ID to the peered article, so it would specify its own article ID just assigned to the peered copy of the message. How would a client know: which shows the article number and newsgroup for a message on *my* server was the same as: or The Xref header shows only what my server assigned for an article number for every article my client retrieves from my server. It won't know what some other server did for article ID assignment. But the MID should remain the same for peered articles, even when posted to multiple newsgroups (multiple pointers to one copy of the article). Xref would allow tracking of cross-posted articles within the same server, not across servers. I thought that's what the MID was used for. Doesn't the MID stay the same in each copy of a cross-posted message? I would think so since the server only has 1 copy of the message and simply uses pointers to it in each newsgroup. If the client is tracking messages by Xref, that only works within the confines of one server. I have accounts to individual.net, eternal-september, and albasani, and I could add more. I could read a message on server-A in newsgroup-A but see the same (peered) message on server-B crossposted to newsgroup-B. Same article but different article IDs on each server. The MID would be the same, though. I can see the newsrc file would let you track cross-posted articles across newsgroups but only on one server. From what I read of newsrc files, that's what they're for: used for one account that connects to one server. Each server gets its own newsrc file. Okay, but that doesn't cover every scenario for tracking cross-posted messages, like when reading each of the cross-posted newsgroups from a differen server. Still having something (tracking cross-posting within a server) would be better than nothing. Likely the vast majority of Usenetizens only connect to one server. |
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#17
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Thunderbird -OT
On 03/11/2019 02.52, T wrote:
On 11/2/19 6:47 PM, Paul in Houston TX wrote: Ken Blake wrote: Sorry about the off-topic question, but I don't know where else to ask this. I'm been trying Thunderbird 68.2.1 as my newsreader, rather than Agent, which I used to use. I like some things about Thunderbird better than Agent and some less, so I haven't yet decided which to stick with. But I have a Thunderbird question: A cross-posted message is showing up in each folder I open that it's been cross-posted to. Is it possible to have it appear only once? If so, what should I change to make that happen. That's a missing feature in Thunderbird. :-( The only way I know to do that is to create a filter for your account server for that post. That is the only way I can think of either. Doubles in two groups don't bug me. I use the "Tag" option the color threads I am following. I just tag only one group so I ignore the other. Problem is, there are people that don't answer on all the groups. What I do is, read in one group, then on the other group skim the posts that list the previous group. Manually. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#18
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Thunderbird -OT
On 11/3/2019 12:37 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 03/11/2019 02.52, T wrote: On 11/2/19 6:47 PM, Paul in Houston TX wrote: Ken Blake wrote: Sorry about the off-topic question, but I don't know where else to ask this. I'm been trying Thunderbird 68.2.1 as my newsreader, rather than Agent, which I used to use. I like some things about Thunderbird better than Agent and some less, so I haven't yet decided which to stick with. But I have a Thunderbird question: A cross-posted message is showing up in each folder I open that it's been cross-posted to. Is it possible to have it appear only once? If so, what should I change to make that happen. That's a missing feature in Thunderbird. :-( Apparently so. I've asked in the Thunderbird NG. If I get a different answer, I'll post back here. The only way I know to do that is to create a filter for your account server for that post. That is the only way I can think of either. Doubles in two groups don't bug me. I use the "Tag" option the color threads I am following. I just tag only one group so I ignore the other. Problem is, there are people that don't answer on all the groups. What I do is, read in one group, then on the other group skim the posts that list the previous group. Manually. -- Ken |
#19
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Thunderbird -OT
On 3 Nov 2019 12:19:15 GMT, Frank Slootweg wrote:
VanguardLH wrote: Ken Springer wrote: VanguardLH wrote: At best, and if Thunderbird supports it, an article that you read in one newsgroup could be marked as read when you visit another newsgroup to which the article was cross-posted. That used to work, years ago, is my understanding. But Mozilla either broke it or deleted the functionality. I don't know which. Keeping a local cache of all MIDs ever retrieved, so the list could be checked for when you decided to read an article (mark it as read) and flag it in the list to then scan the MIDs in every other newsgroup you visit to check for the flag is a lot of overhead. It's a trivial task, that's why most newsreaders have this functionality. Agent 2.0 has two options under what they call Crosspost Management: o Subject, Author, Date, Lines o Message ID Actions include the following options: o Do Nothing o Mark Read o Don't Retrieve Note that Agent 2.0 uses a separate database for its crosspost management tasks, not the .newsrc file. I don't think the .newsrc file can be used for this task, even if a developer wanted to. The crosspost database gets consulted/updated during article retrieval, and it gets purged during article delete/purge, so it never has records for 'all messages ever received' unless the user never does any housekeeping. The xref header wouldn't be a good choice because it's server specific. It's not that unusual to have multiple servers defined, which would likely break crosspost checking. Why is it trivial? Because your News server adds its article numbers (note: article numbers, *not* message-ids (MIDs)) to the 'Xref:' header it generates and puts in the local (server) copy of the article. Example: Xref: uni-berlin.de alt.comp.os.windows-10:105943 alt.comp.freewa951278 So when your newsreader notices you've read the article in one of the groups, it will mark all the article numbers (105943 and 951278 in the example) as read. (When you 'leave' a group, the article numbers of read articles are updated in your '.newsrc' file (or equivalent).) As stated above, Agent does all of its crosspost checking during article retrieval. No further work is done when a message is read/unread. Also, I don't think .newsrc is allowed to be used for crosspost management. So your newsreader does not have to keep "a local cache of all MIDs ever retrieved". It just has to process the article numbers which are readily available in the 'Xref:' header of the very article it's currently processing. Just check any crossposted article and you'll see the groupnames and your server's article numbers in the 'Xref:' which your server generated/added. N.B. Article numbers are server-specific and the 'Xref:' header is one of the few headers a News server is allowed to change (in transit from one server to the next). Agreed, and that's why xref wouldn't be the best choice. |
#20
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Thunderbird -OT
On 03/11/2019 20.50, Ken Blake wrote:
On 11/3/2019 12:37 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote: On 03/11/2019 02.52, T wrote: On 11/2/19 6:47 PM, Paul in Houston TX wrote: Ken Blake wrote: Sorry about the off-topic question, but I don't know where else to ask this. I'm been trying Thunderbird 68.2.1 as my newsreader, rather than Agent, which I used to use. I like some things about Thunderbird better than Agent and some less, so I haven't yet decided which to stick with. But I have a Thunderbird question: A cross-posted message is showing up in each folder I open that it's been cross-posted to. Is it possible to have it appear only once? If so, what should I change to make that happen. That's a missing feature in Thunderbird. :-( Apparently so. I've asked in the Thunderbird NG. If I get a different answer, I'll post back here. Thanks :-) Even a plugin or an external program would help. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#21
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Thunderbird -OT
On 11/3/2019 3:46 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
[...] The xref header wouldn't be a good choice because it's server specific. It's not that unusual to have multiple servers defined, which would likely break crosspost checking. I'm not sure how common it is for users to access newsgroups from multiple servers. In all the years that I used Outlook Express, which had the ability to mark cross-posts as read, it never failed to do so correctly because I don't use multiple servers. However, providing the option to turn off cross-post checking could satisfy both types of users. -- best regards, Neil |
#22
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Thunderbird -OT
On 03/11/2019 14:54, Ken Blake wrote:
On 11/3/2019 7:42 AM, Ken Blake wrote: On 11/2/2019 7:05 PM, VanguardLH wrote: Ken Blake wrote: Sorry about the off-topic question, but I don't know where else to ask this. I'm been trying Thunderbird 68.2.1 as my newsreader, rather than Agent, which I used to use. I like some things about Thunderbird better than Agent and some less, so I haven't yet decided which to stick with. But I have a Thunderbird question: A cross-posted message is showing up in each folder I open that it's been cross-posted to. Is it possible to have it appear only once? If so, what should I change to make that happen. Thunderbird newsgroup: mozilla.support.thunderbird Mozilla NNTP server:Â*Â* news.mozilla.org, port 119 I doubt you can have a newsgroup omitted in one newsgroup when visiting another newsgroup to which it was cross-posted.Â* After all, hiding would depend on which newsgroup you visited first to then hide in the other newsgroup(s) which you might or might not visit.Â* Also, just because someone decides to cross-post to multiple newsgroups doesn't mean everyone who replies must also post to the same group of newsgroups. Users might decide to send their reply only to the newsgroups they know or the ones they visit, not to someplace they don't know and don't go, especially if cross-posting involves unrelated or garbage newsgroups. You'd read an article with its replies in one newsgroup but hiding that article in another newsgroup means not seeing the separate replies over there.Â* No one has to cross-post their replies to the same newsgroups the prior user decided to cross-post to. At best, and if Thunderbird supports it, an article that you read in one newsgroup could be marked as read when you visit another newsgroup to which the article was cross-posted. Yes, I worded my question poorly. That's what I wanted. Thank you and thanks to all others who responded. It looks like I can't do what I want, but I'll try the Thunderbird newsgroup. I have a vague memory of having tried to get the,re but my newsserver couldn't get there. I'll try again. OK, I just subscribed to it. My memory of a problem was wrong. I don't think you'll have much luck. This issue is a reason many people don't use Thunderbird and development on the project has crawled to a halt. To my mind it is the best free nntp and email desktop client. However, nntp is niche and email is all webmail these days so there's little demand. Correction: I had noticed that development had moved, but I didn't realise that I had to download the new version rather than allow it to update. My version is quite old (60.9.0) and the current version is 68.2.1 |
#23
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Thunderbird -OT
In article , Neil
wrote: I'm not sure how common it is for users to access newsgroups from multiple servers. it's extremely common for binary downloads, which is the overwhelming majority of usenet these days. |
#24
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Thunderbird -OT
VanguardLH wrote:
Frank Slootweg wrote: VanguardLH wrote: Ken Springer wrote: VanguardLH wrote: At best, and if Thunderbird supports it, an article that you read in one newsgroup could be marked as read when you visit another newsgroup to which the article was cross-posted. That used to work, years ago, is my understanding. But Mozilla either broke it or deleted the functionality. I don't know which. Keeping a local cache of all MIDs ever retrieved, so the list could be checked for when you decided to read an article (mark it as read) and flag it in the list to then scan the MIDs in every other newsgroup you visit to check for the flag is a lot of overhead. It's a trivial task, that's why most newsreaders have this functionality. Why is it trivial? Because your News server adds its article numbers (note: article numbers, *not* message-ids (MIDs)) to the 'Xref:' header it generates and puts in the local (server) copy of the article. Example: Xref: uni-berlin.de alt.comp.os.windows-10:105943 alt.comp.freewa951278 So when your newsreader notices you've read the article in one of the groups, it will mark all the article numbers (105943 and 951278 in the example) as read. (When you 'leave' a group, the article numbers of read articles are updated in your '.newsrc' file (or equivalent).) So your newsreader does not have to keep "a local cache of all MIDs ever retrieved". It just has to process the article numbers which are readily available in the 'Xref:' header of the very article it's currently processing. Just check any crossposted article and you'll see the groupnames and your server's article numbers in the 'Xref:' which your server generated/added. N.B. Article numbers are server-specific and the 'Xref:' header is one of the few headers a News server is allowed to change (in transit from one server to the next). If it is so trivial to code, why hasn't it appeared in 20 years? Because Thunderbird - especially the NetNews part - is one big mess. Mozilla Dev obviously never bothered with the requested feature. Apparently the volunteer community isn't addressing the old tickets, either. Thunderbird is sensitive to where is the newsrc file. From bug ticket https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99238, still listed with New status (i.e., not resolved) after 18 years, moving the newsrc file somehow disconnects Thunderbird from knowing which newsgroups to which it was subscribed under an account. Thunderbird sometimes corrupts the newsrc file (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=403200, 12 years old). Apparently TB currently uses the newsrc file only for recording the subscribed groups, *not* for recording the article numbers of the read articles in those groups. See Tools - Account Settings - your News account - 'Server Settings' - Message Storage - newsrc file: - Browse... You will see one or more server.rc files with entries like: alt.comp.os.windows-10: which means you're subscribed to that group. A *normal* (non-TB) .newsrc file would have: alt.comp.os.windows-10: 1-37201,37225,37231,37233-37235 which means I've read all articles with the indicated ranges and numbers. I.e. I've *not* (yet) read articles 37202-37224, 37226-37230 and 37232. Why TB can't be bothered to do this properly is anyone's guess. Aren't newsrc files just text files? That means having to open then and parse each line to scan for article numbers. That's very slow. Yes, as shown above, they're just text files. Slow!? You're kidding right!? Scanning a few hundred line text file, which is probably cached in memory, is slow? You do realize that the articles themselves - and the headers in them - are also 'just' text. The .newsrc file is orders of magnitude smaller than the articles, so why worry about it's 'slowness'? That's very slow. If you subscribe to just a few newsgroups, probably not a noticeable performance impact. If you subscribe to a few hundred, yeah, all that lookup will be slow. Isn't there a newsrc file for every subscribed newsgroup? No. One .newsrc file for all the groups subscribed on a particular News server. When selecting a newsgroup to download, each article retrieve would have its ID search in all the newsrc files for every other subscribed newsgroup. When you subscribe, and when retrieving all new messages (which would be ALL of them), that would require the article lookup across all the other newsrc files. If there is just one newsrc per account (i.e., per server) which tracks all messages across all subscribed newsgroups, that would be less files to parse and scan. I don't use newsgroups from a *NIX host, so I've not been acquainted with newsrc files or how their contents are structured, and I didn't have to deal with them with Thunderbird on Windows. On searching, all the online article talk about how to use tools to tidy up or modify the newsrc files or how to use them for configuration, but I've not found one that delves into the content or structure of one. Can Notepad or gvim be used to edit a newsrc file? You normally do not edit a .newsrc file, because it's created, managed and maintained by your newsreader. But, being a text file, you *can* edit it with any text editor. When you edit it, you do it while your newsreader isn't running, so that your newsreader doesn't interfere with the changes you're making. I could give an example of when one might like to edit a .newsrc file, but that's not very useful in the context of this thread, i.e. TB not being able to marked crossposted articles as read in all crossposted groups. If I were still using Thunderbird, I would hope newsrc files are databases and not text files. If all articles ever retrieved for a subscribed newsgroup on a server were stored in a newsrc file, and since some newsgroups have MANY thousands of article depending on the retention of the server, that's a lot or records to store in a text file to then parse every line to scan for a matching article ID. A .newsrc file only records *ranges* of article numbers, with the occasional not-yet-read article numbers. A typical entry/line is well less than 80 characters. *Some* entries/ lines might be a few hundred characters long, during the time you have not yet completely 'catched up' with the group. For example, my .newsrc file is 2574 bytes, 94 lines, i.e. a little over *27* characters per entry (including LF). Believe me, the structure, 'size', 'slowness', etc. of a .newsrc file is a complete non-issue. It wasn't an issue on 640KB machines and it surely isn't now. Seems odd that Thunderbird uses SQLite for some of its databases but doesn't embrace Sqlite for all its databases (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_...-_Thunderbird). Article IDs are unique per server. Only the MID value remains the same as the article gets peered across servers (barring MID collisions). You mentioned the Xref header has the article's ID number, but it also specifies the server from which the article was retrieved. The same article on a different server would have a different article ID. A user might subscribe to a newsgroup on more than one server: a cross-posted article could be one one server in one newsgroup but the user looks at the copy on a different server in the other cross-posted newsgroup. The Xref you see would be for the server you used for a subscribed newsgroup to retrieve a copy of a message. In the cross-posted newsgroup where you retrieved the message from a different server, that other server's article number would be different. You'd see one message with its Xref showing server, newsgroup, and article number but the cross-posted copy that got peered to the other server would show other server, cross-posted newsgroup, and different article number. Seems the lookup to establish the same state (i.e., read) across cross-posted newsgroups would only work within the confines of subscribing to newsgroups on the same server. When peering an article across servers, I thought only the MID value was retained. If a newsreader can handle getting articles from multiple News servers, then there's a .newsrc file per server. Handling multiple servers is of course more complex, but several newsreaders handle this functionality in a seamless way. (AFAICT, TB can handle multiple News servers, but without any integration, i.e. if you're subscribed to the same newsgroup on multiple servers, you'll see each article multiple times.) Seem the Xref header MUST be changed by the server when an article is peered to it. Yes. The peered-to server would assign its own article ID to the peered article, so it would specify its own article ID just assigned to the peered copy of the message. How would a client know: Xref: uni-berlin.de alt.comp.os.windows-10:106017 which shows the article number and newsgroup for a message on *my* server was the same as: Xref: yourserver alt.comp.os.windows-10:someOtherArticleID or Xref: yourserver crosspostednewsgroup:someOtherArticleNumber The Xref header shows only what my server assigned for an article number for every article my client retrieves from my server. It won't know what some other server did for article ID assignment. But the MID should remain the same for peered articles, even when posted to multiple newsgroups (multiple pointers to one copy of the article). Xref would allow tracking of cross-posted articles within the same server, not across servers. I thought that's what the MID was used for. Doesn't the MID stay the same in each copy of a cross-posted message? I would think so since the server only has 1 copy of the message and simply uses pointers to it in each newsgroup. If the client is tracking messages by Xref, that only works within the confines of one server. I have accounts to individual.net, eternal-september, and albasani, and I could add more. I could read a message on server-A in newsgroup-A but see the same (peered) message on server-B crossposted to newsgroup-B. Same article but different article IDs on each server. The MID would be the same, though. I can see the newsrc file would let you track cross-posted articles across newsgroups but only on one server. From what I read of newsrc files, that's what they're for: used for one account that connects to one server. Each server gets its own newsrc file. Okay, but that doesn't cover every scenario for tracking cross-posted messages, like when reading each of the cross-posted newsgroups from a differen server. Still having something (tracking cross-posting within a server) would be better than nothing. Likely the vast majority of Usenetizens only connect to one server. As I said, several newsreaders can handle multiple News servers just fine, in a seamless way. Perhaps people using such newsreaders can come forward with specifics. (In the meantime, Char already posted about Agent.) FWIW, I use a local,'small', 'personal', News server (Hamster) to - amongst others - get the same - multi-server - functionality. Hamster sits between my newsreader (tin) and my NSP (News SP), News.Individual.[DE|.NET]. To my NSP, Hamster looks like a newsreader. To my newsreader, Hamster looks like a News server. |
#25
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Thunderbird -OT
Char Jackson wrote:
On 3 Nov 2019 12:19:15 GMT, Frank Slootweg wrote: VanguardLH wrote: Ken Springer wrote: VanguardLH wrote: At best, and if Thunderbird supports it, an article that you read in one newsgroup could be marked as read when you visit another newsgroup to which the article was cross-posted. That used to work, years ago, is my understanding. But Mozilla either broke it or deleted the functionality. I don't know which. Keeping a local cache of all MIDs ever retrieved, so the list could be checked for when you decided to read an article (mark it as read) and flag it in the list to then scan the MIDs in every other newsgroup you visit to check for the flag is a lot of overhead. It's a trivial task, that's why most newsreaders have this functionality. Agent 2.0 has two options under what they call Crosspost Management: o Subject, Author, Date, Lines o Message ID Actions include the following options: o Do Nothing o Mark Read o Don't Retrieve Note that Agent 2.0 uses a separate database for its crosspost management tasks, not the .newsrc file. I don't think the .newsrc file can be used for this task, even if a developer wanted to. Correct. Apparently Agent does things differently and has more functionality (than just noting/marking article numbers). The crosspost database gets consulted/updated during article retrieval, and it gets purged during article delete/purge, so it never has records for 'all messages ever received' unless the user never does any housekeeping. The xref header wouldn't be a good choice because it's server specific. It's not that unusual to have multiple servers defined, which would likely break crosspost checking. Correct. As I mentioned in another response, multiple servers needs either multiple .newsrc files or another method/database (such as Agent uses). [...] |
#26
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Thunderbird -OT
On 11/4/2019 2:29 AM, Chris wrote:
On 03/11/2019 14:54, Ken Blake wrote: On 11/3/2019 7:42 AM, Ken Blake wrote: On 11/2/2019 7:05 PM, VanguardLH wrote: Ken Blake wrote: Sorry about the off-topic question, but I don't know where else to ask this. I'm been trying Thunderbird 68.2.1 as my newsreader, rather than Agent, which I used to use. I like some things about Thunderbird better than Agent and some less, so I haven't yet decided which to stick with. But I have a Thunderbird question: A cross-posted message is showing up in each folder I open that it's been cross-posted to. Is it possible to have it appear only once? If so, what should I change to make that happen. Thunderbird newsgroup: mozilla.support.thunderbird Mozilla NNTP server:Â*Â* news.mozilla.org, port 119 I doubt you can have a newsgroup omitted in one newsgroup when visiting another newsgroup to which it was cross-posted.Â* After all, hiding would depend on which newsgroup you visited first to then hide in the other newsgroup(s) which you might or might not visit.Â* Also, just because someone decides to cross-post to multiple newsgroups doesn't mean everyone who replies must also post to the same group of newsgroups. Users might decide to send their reply only to the newsgroups they know or the ones they visit, not to someplace they don't know and don't go, especially if cross-posting involves unrelated or garbage newsgroups. You'd read an article with its replies in one newsgroup but hiding that article in another newsgroup means not seeing the separate replies over there.Â* No one has to cross-post their replies to the same newsgroups the prior user decided to cross-post to. At best, and if Thunderbird supports it, an article that you read in one newsgroup could be marked as read when you visit another newsgroup to which the article was cross-posted. Yes, I worded my question poorly. That's what I wanted. Thank you and thanks to all others who responded. It looks like I can't do what I want, but I'll try the Thunderbird newsgroup. I have a vague memory of having tried to get the,re but my newsserver couldn't get there. I'll try again. OK, I just subscribed to it. My memory of a problem was wrong. I don't think you'll have much luck. I don't think so either. So far I've had no replies. This issue is a reason many people don't use Thunderbird It's not the biggest of issues to me, but it is an issue. There are still things about Thunderbird that I like better than Agent. and development on the project has crawled to a halt. To my mind it is the best free nntp Best free usenet client? Definitely. Best usenet client? I'm not so sure. and email desktop client. I haven't tried it for e-mail, primarily because I use Outlook, and am mostly happy with it. However, nntp is niche Alas, yes. It's disappearing, and email is all webmail these days That's incredible to me, but yes, it's largely true. It's hard for me understand why anyone would prefer webmail to even the poorest e-mail client. so there's little demand. Correction: I had noticed that development had moved, but I didn't realise that I had to download the new version rather than allow it to update. My version is quite old (60.9.0) and the current version is 68.2.1 I didn't have to download it. It prompted me to do it. -- Ken |
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Thunderbird -OT
On Mon, 04 Nov 2019 09:42:09 -0400, nospam wrote:
In article , Neil wrote: I'm not sure how common it is for users to access newsgroups from multiple servers. it's extremely common for binary downloads, which is the overwhelming majority of usenet these days. Agreed, but even the text-only folks have been migrating to the free NSPs such as Eternal-September and AEIOU (sp?), and from what I hear, the free providers are flaky enough that people are configuring both so they'll have a fallback when the primary goes down. |
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Thunderbird -OT
On 4 Nov 2019 14:22:20 GMT, Frank Slootweg wrote:
[big snips ahead, because it's mostly stuff that I agree with and some other stuff that I'm not addressing in this post] Apparently TB currently uses the newsrc file only for recording the subscribed groups, *not* for recording the article numbers of the read articles in those groups. See Tools - Account Settings - your News account - 'Server Settings' - Message Storage - newsrc file: - Browse... You will see one or more server.rc files with entries like: alt.comp.os.windows-10: which means you're subscribed to that group. A *normal* (non-TB) .newsrc file would have: alt.comp.os.windows-10: 1-37201,37225,37231,37233-37235 which means I've read all articles with the indicated ranges and numbers. I.e. I've *not* (yet) read articles 37202-37224, 37226-37230 and 37232. Why TB can't be bothered to do this properly is anyone's guess. Hmmm, that's very interesting. Are you sure that your .newsrc file is indicating which articles you've read? My experience is limited to Agent, which has always touted itself as being fully compliant with standards, (and why wouldn't they), but with Agent the ..newsrc file only tells me a few things. 1. Contains a list of all available newsgroups available at this server, one newsgroup per line, ending with a blank line to indicate EOF. My current server, Newshosting, carried 110,673 groups as of my last refresh, so my .newsrc file for this server is 110,674 lines long. 2. Shows me which groups are currently subscribed (: versus !) Subscribed groups are moved to the top of the list. 3. For any group for which I've ever retrieved headers, (whether currently subscribed or previously subscribed), it tells me the server-specific article numbers that have been retrieved, shortening the list to a range (x-y) when possible, otherwise using a comma separated list. That's all, nothing else. No Message IDs, no read/unread status. No additional fields of any kind. Does your .newsrc tell you more than that? If so, the whole notion of sharing a common .newsrc file across multiple newsreaders is in jeopardy. Not that I share a common .newsrc, but I always assumed that I could. That's essentially why it was created, after all. One .newsrc file for all the groups subscribed on a particular News server. For all of the groups that are available at that server, not just the groups that are subscribed. A .newsrc file only records *ranges* of article numbers, with the occasional not-yet-read article numbers. I would change "not-yet-read" to "not-yet-retrieved". There is no requirement that news servers create and assign article numbers in sequential order. They usually and normally do, but Easynews (for example) used to be notorious for creating articles out of order. Agent, and I presume other newsreaders, has the capability to deal with that through a configuration setting. In Agent, for each configured server, you get an opportunity to declare that this "Server creates messages out of order." By checking the box, you're telling Agent not to assume that the highest article number means that everything before that has been retrieved. There's also an edge case that a certain Dutch dump group presented quite a few years back. That group got so much traffic that news servers were forced to roll over the article numbers, starting again at the beginning. Newsreaders were generally unprepared for that and marked everything as retrieved, thus making tons of posts 'disappear'. The Easynews support group was awash with support requests when that happened. Folks who had configured their newsreaders to expect article numbers to be retrieved out of order didn't suffer when the article numbers rolled over. Everyone else did. (Full recovery was always possible, of course.) A typical entry/line is well less than 80 characters. *Some* entries/ lines might be a few hundred characters long, during the time you have not yet completely 'catched up' with the group. For example, my .newsrc file is 2574 bytes, 94 lines, i.e. a little over *27* characters per entry (including LF). As a second data point to reinforce your position, my Newshosting .newsrc file is currently 3,008,221 bytes, 110,674 lines (one line per group plus a trailing blank line to show end-of-file). The longest line is 14,211 columns, but the second longest is just 85 columns and every line after that is less than 45 columns. All in all, this would be extremely easy to parse, if desired. Believe me, the structure, 'size', 'slowness', etc. of a .newsrc file is a complete non-issue. It wasn't an issue on 640KB machines and it surely isn't now. I totally agree. If a newsreader can handle getting articles from multiple News servers, then there's a .newsrc file per server. Handling multiple servers is of course more complex, but several newsreaders handle this functionality in a seamless way. (AFAICT, TB can handle multiple News servers, but without any integration, i.e. if you're subscribed to the same newsgroup on multiple servers, you'll see each article multiple times.) That's why Agent uses a separate database for its Crosspost Management function. The .newsrc file(s) aren't suitable substitutes since they: 1. Don't show read status. 2. Don't include Message IDs. 3. Only show server-specific article numbers. The newsreader would have no way of knowing that article X on server A is the same as article Y on server B if all it had to go on is the article number. So .newsrc file(s) are useless for crosspost management. FWIW, I use a local,'small', 'personal', News server (Hamster) to - amongst others - get the same - multi-server - functionality. Hamster sits between my newsreader (tin) and my NSP (News SP), News.Individual.[DE|.NET]. To my NSP, Hamster looks like a newsreader. To my newsreader, Hamster looks like a News server. That's good to hear. I used to hear a lot of Hamster stories in the early 2000's, but not so much anymore. Same with Stunnel stories. I used Stunnel for a period of time, but never Hamster. I'm familiar with it, though. |
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Thunderbird -OT
On Sat, 2 Nov 2019 18:11:51 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
Sorry about the off-topic question, but I don't know where else to ask this. I'm been trying Thunderbird 68.2.1 as my newsreader, rather than Agent, which I used to use. I like some things about Thunderbird better than Agent and some less, so I haven't yet decided which to stick with. What kinds of issues are you having with Agent? I was going to suggest posting in alt.usenet.offline-reader.forte-agent but I see that you're already active over there. |
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Thunderbird -OT
On Sun, 3 Nov 2019 07:54:50 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
On 11/3/2019 7:42 AM, Ken Blake wrote: On 11/2/2019 7:05 PM, VanguardLH wrote: Ken Blake wrote: Sorry about the off-topic question, but I don't know where else to ask this. I'm been trying Thunderbird 68.2.1 as my newsreader, rather than Agent, which I used to use. I like some things about Thunderbird better than Agent and some less, so I haven't yet decided which to stick with. But I have a Thunderbird question: A cross-posted message is showing up in each folder I open that it's been cross-posted to. Is it possible to have it appear only once? If so, what should I change to make that happen. Thunderbird newsgroup: mozilla.support.thunderbird Mozilla NNTP server: news.mozilla.org, port 119 OK, I just subscribed to it. My memory of a problem was wrong. I'm curious, did you subscribe to it on news.individual.net or on news.mozilla.org? Are the two groups mirrored? |
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