Re: OE Is Deleting My NG Headers

Neil

You can get situations where headers appear and when you go to get the
body it is no longer there. Numbers involved are few. I have seen this
attributed to messages being cancelled by the sender. I have not seen
this phenomenon remove messages with bodies. The cancelled header
remains until the newsgroup is next synchronised.

Another problem that can arise is not to receive newsgroup messages that
have been posted. This is most noticeable if one of the missing messages
is one of your own. This arises where two or more servers are supposed
to be synchronised but something goes awry and they are not
synchronised. . You get messages from one server and then get messages
later from one of the others and find you have missing messages. This
situation can be confirmed by checking that the numbering of messages is
an unbroken sequence. It has not happened so often recently as in the
past. The solution is to reset the newsgroup and start again.

The situation when you lost newsgroup messages. Was it before or since
the introduction of OE5.00?

--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Neil wrote:
Thanks for the helpful note. I don;t think it was any of these. But
thanks for sharing this info!

Neil


"Gerry" <gerry@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:O%23xxBEBhJHA.1288@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Neil

Loss of newgroup messages. This can happen if something happens to
cause the folder (file) to corrupt. A power failure could cause
corruption if data was being written to the file and the process was
interupted. Newsgroup folders can get very large so that a system
lacking resources in terms of memory and CPU capacity can have
difficulty handling the file. In this situation the chances of
interuption and corruption are greater. Interupting the automatic
compaction process is the most common cause of file corruption.
Normally users report loss of messages from the inbox or sent items
folders. These messages are irreplaceable, whereas messages in
newsgroup folders can easily be replaced. As a consequence loss of
newsgroup messages is not commonly reported. The delete option when
compacting was also a common cause of file
corruption because it could be working when Outlook Express was
amongst other things Online. Compacting was supposed to work in the
background allowing the user to continue to use Outlook Express for
reading, writing and posting messages. It was a disaster. The
opportunities for interupting the compaction process were
significantly increased and file corruption was common until the
user of Outlook Express learnt how to adopt practices to minimise
the risk. In the absence of measures from Microsoft to resolve the
problem Steve Cochran, posting in this conversation, wrote his first
message recovery utility, DBXtract, to help users recover messages
from corrupted dbx files. The delete option was specifically
designed to work with Compacting messages in the Background. You had
to select the option to Compact Messages in the Background for the
delete option to work. When Microsoft eventually removed the option
to Compact Messages in the Background they overlooked the delete
option and it became a redundant relic. Another way to lose newsgroup
messages is to unintentionally delete
messages by clicking on the wrong button. In Tools, Options,
Maintenance, CleanUp now are four buttons. One is Compact but the
other three buttons all remove the contents of the selected folder.


--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Neil wrote:
It does make sense. Apart from differences only available by
using a synchronize command the main thing that you need to be
aware of is the Get 300 headers... option and the fact that its
value is
used to do
an automatic Get Next 300... every time you enter a newsgroup when
you are in a Working Online state.

I don't have any problem getting headers. OE gets them for me
automatically when I enter a newsgroup. No problem. And I have it
set to 1,000, not 300. So the Next 1,000 command works fine too. No
problem there. But that has nothing to do with what I'm saying.


If you don't want that to happen,
either don't enter that newsgroup or enter it with Work Offline
set.

I do want it to happen. And it's happening. No problem.


If you don't have the Get next 300... option checked the automatic
Get next done for you has the equivalent effect of a Synchronize
Newsgroup command done while the Synchronize settings are
Headers Only.

OK.


And, like I said, didn't used to be that way. I remember a point
where OE would keep downloaded headers indefinitely.


Was this with a different NNTP server? In any case servers change
how they act over time and they may also be set up to serve
different newsgroups differently.

I can't say if it was a different one, or when exactly it changed. I
remember, though, that headers would stay indefinitely, and I had at
least a years' worth of headers in one particular newsgroup. One day
I was playing aroudn with the synchronization settings, and then I
lost all my headers! I was aghast. So I changed it back to No
Synchronization. But ever since then, it kept deleting old headers,
though it never did it before I played around with the
synchronization settings.
But that was on a different PC anyway. This laptop is only about six
months old, and that was a few years ago that it happened. So
anything that happened on that PC wouldn't affect what happens on
this PC (and I didn't bring my message stores over from another PC
or anything). So, even though I can trace the point in time when it
changed to when I changed the synchronization settings (and then
changed back to No Synchronization), that wouldn't explain why it's
happening on this PC, which had a new install of OE.

Neil


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