"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in
:

Agreed, if they're all going into the same folder/window/whatever. It
does need to fetch, though, on some sort of schedule ...


Xnews solves that by getting the headers. It only takes a moment on this
group, and only a moment to fetch the whole post when I select it.

On big groups I visit for the first time, getting headers is a pain, never
mind the posts too, but I can select a numeric range fron N to 1, where N can
be a huge number, up to the total available, and 1 is the latest post. I'd
prefer to select by post number or date as a range just to get the headers,
but I guess Usenet never developed a way to do that because no-one expected
to deal with the bulk of posts now available on the big groups. I think this
is why the big web-based binaries services like Giganews and Easynews
developed, to solve that on the server side, and provide other keys to narrow
searches with.

Saving posts in Xnews has the option of headers only, or full posts. I use
headers only to save time and space (these things warp entirely too easily,
don't you know? If I want to save a thread for reference I do, but often
they are archived all over the web, for years. I only save incoming posts if
I'm concerned with losing one if they didn't.