Crashes with Firefox Quantum

Andy wrote:


Setting up Thunderbird is a lot of work.

And require downloading all messages.

I don't use newsgroups that often.

Andy

It requires downloading each message you click
on, to read it. If there were a thousand spam
messages in a group, then I don't pay any price
by ignoring them. Only the ones I read, do I
pay a little download fee to get the text.

Thunderbird operation consists of three parts.

1) Scan for high water mark on each subscribed group.
Now Thunderbird knows how many new messages are
in each group. This takes a packet per subscribed
newsgroup or so.

2) The user clicks on a group. The header list
is downloaded for the new messages. You need enough
header info, to paint the second pane with the
message Subject materials, date, Author. Again,
this might take ten seconds.

3) While lazily reading one message at a time, you
download the message at that point.

And when Thunderbird shuts down at the end of the
day, the two files per newsgroup in the profile folder,
keep the header info for the group. There is at least
a mid for each message. If a message ages out on the
server, clicking the item in Thunderbird returns an
appropriate error message, when Thunderbird sends the
mid to the server, and the news server says the
message doesn't exist.

Relatively speaking, the overhead is low. It might
take a couple years, to end up with a 50MB header file
for this newsgroup. And that's a measure of your download
rate.

It's sorta the same amount of overhead as Google Groups,
only you get to keep track of what messages you've already
read. And you have the headers to look at, if for example,
you're wondering whatever happened to user "X". Like, when
did they last appear on the news group.

Paul