Message no longer available

Not likely. Your news server has probably killed off the sporge, or the source machine upstream has sent out cancels for it all, and your news server is actually *honoring* the cancels :-)

Don't worry about the "no longer avaialble" -- it is junk.

Enjoy, DoN.

Ah, that's a relief. Thanks, Don.

The thing that throws me is that the posts in question were from legit members and they were on current threads. But when I go to Google to see if they show up on Google Groups, they're not there. Of course, Google tends to lag, so I'll check again.

-- Ed Huntress

Whoop, they're showing up now. Those messages are indeed legit messages that my server says are "no longer available." But they're showing up on Google Groups.

-- Ed Huntress

Google Groups is the Last Resort when it comes to reading news.

Learn to like/use an archiving reader like Agent. I keep my own archive of messages for 13 days and then they will auto purge. If I mark them as Keep they will be around till I unmark them. I've replied to kept messages that I have on my computer a long time after my provider has dumped them.

There are several good archiving readers around. Once you get used to using one you will wonder how you ever got along without.

Ok, but how will that help recover messages that never make it past your news server? That appears to be what happened, although I have no idea how it works.

The headers were there but the message bodies were not. My news reader never got a chance to download them at all.

-- Ed Huntress

That's the "orge" of the "Sporge" They are forgeries -- they pick up "Subject: " headers and usernames from valid members and forge both, before filling the body of the articles with garbage.

Enjoy, DoN.

Hmm ... then your news server's admin was overly zealous in killing off the sporge. He flushed the entire newsgroup, and then hoped that the real ones would propagate back in over time (and they probably will, as long as he also blew away the "history" record of "Message-ID: "s received).

Enjoy, DoN.

Interesting. I usually ignore this stuff, having enough to learn as it is, but maybe I'll give them a call and see what they say. What you're saying sounds reasonable.

-- Ed Huntress

My news server will probably repost them all in a couple days. :-/

They are really screwed up, and I get a lot of ghosts of day and multi day old messages, showing up as new.

Cheers Trevor Jones

That used to happen to me but I haven't had any problems with the old-messages-as-new for a year or so. I've used this server for around five or six years now, and they do seem to be getting better. But they do get fouled up after one of those sporge attacks.

-- Ed Huntress

I misunderstood what you meant Ed. I thought you were complaining about old messages that were removed early due to the sporge attack. I used to see that many years ago before I switched to Agent. The reader I was using just kept the headers and always had to retrieve the message bodies when you went online.

I haven't seen any headers with missing bodies for quite sometime. I've never been lucky enough (cough) to use Outlook either, but I always understood that it doesn't archive messages in newsgroups. I'm probably wrong about that too...

It's all black magic and hocus-pocus. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Fortunately there are experts around to call on when I really need something computerish, when I need a proctology exam, and when I need to have a relative embalmed.

-- Ed Huntress