Subject: Question about newsreading in Pine

From: Tony Calguire <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 1995 23:45:02 -0500

Because of problems with my news server, I've been using the aggregate 
command set in order to delete large numbers of unwanted posts.

Now, since Pine can't actually delete news messages, I'm wondering...

Is Pine making some huge file to keep track of the hundreds of messages I 
don't want to see?  I only have 250 Kb of account space, and I don't want 
to fill it up with news configuration files if I don't have to.

Thanks.

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From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 17:55:55 -0400

On Sat, 14 Oct 1995, Tony Calguire wrote:

| [...]
| Is Pine making some huge file to keep track of the hundreds of messages I 
| don't want to see?  I only have 250 Kb of account space, and I don't want 
| to fill it up with news configuration files if I don't have to.

    Don't bet the farm on this, because I have not actually examined the 
Pine source code to see precisely what it is doing, but under 
Unix(-like), I think it just makes numeric range entries of messages you 
don't want to see by number in the .newsrc file.  There is only one entry 
per newsgroup, and if you keep the messages disposed of contiguous, a 
.newsrc entry changes very little in size over time.

Paul
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