XPost: news.newusers.questions, news.software.nntp, news.software.readers
From: rra@stanford.edu
Esther & Fester Bestertester writes:
> When headers are downloaded from a news server, is the newsgroups header
> included? Or is this part of the body of the message that is downloaded
> when requested?
It is part of the header of the message, but my guess is that you're
actually asking slightly the wrong question (a confusion made very easy by
the mislabelling of things in many news readers).
When a news reader says that it's downloading headers, what it's generally
doing is downloading overview information, which isn't the same thing.
The overview is a database of selected headers, not all of the headers of
the message, reformatted to make it easy to provide summary data about
large numbers of messages at once.
Retrieving overview information is highly optimised by news servers and is
much faster than actually downloading all of the article headers.
> I am trying to filter news groups based on newsgroups and cross-posting
> information. My news reader app doesn't have this information when it
> downloads headers.
Most news servers include the Xref header in overview information, but
it's not mandatory and some don't. The Xref header is very similar to the
Newsgroups header, but has two major differences: the format is different
(site name, followed by space-separated entries of newsgroup name, colon,
and article number in that newsgroup), and the Xref header generally
contains only newsgroups carried by that server so you can't filter based
on Xref on newsgroups that your local news server doesn't carry.
Most news servers do not include the Newsgroups header in overview
information, although some do.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
explains why.
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* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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