XPost: news.newusers.questions 
 From: bill@scconsult.com 
  
 In article , 
  Esther & Fester Bestertester  wrote: 
  
 > 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? 
  
 That's dependent on the details of both your news reader and news 
 server.  In practice, many readers only know how to retrieve the set of 
 headers that a server caches in its "overview" database, and most 
 servers only serve the de facto standard set of overview fields: 
 Subject, From, Date, Message-ID, References, Bytes, Lines, and Xref. In 
 principle a server can have a more expansive overview database and some 
 clients know how take advantage of that, and in principle a reader can 
 ask for other individual headers and servers can answer such queries, 
 but with modern news servers the most common practice is to only put 
 those 8 fields into the overview and to only provide answers to the XHDR 
 command (asking for a single specific header field from a range of 
 messages) when the header is in the overview. This is largely because 
 readers generally never really developed robust support for more 
 complete overviews or sane use of non-overview header filtering. The 
 cost of the server offering more than the default set of overview 
 headers is more than it is worth for most sites where the bulk of users 
 can't filter on anything other than the standard set. 
  
 However, you should note that the Xref header is a close relative of the 
 Newsgroups header. Xref is a cross-reference for a specific server of a 
 cross-posted article of the article numbers it has in the various groups 
 where it is present on that one server. It is a normal member of the 
 overview set and is provided by the news system you seem to be using. 
  
  
 > 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. 
 > 
 > Is this just because the application author chooses not to download these 
 > headers? Or is this information only available after the entire message has 
 > been downloaded? 
  
 It has to do with both the server and the newsreader program. It looks 
 like you are using the AT&T news system descended from the Prodigy and 
 SBC news system. Those servers only provide the default overview 
 headers. You apper to be using Asar's Hogwasher news reader, and from 
 what I can tell from a very fast re-examination of that program, it 
 seems to not support filtering on Xref, but only on Newsgroups. 
  
 You may find it useful to look at MT-NewsWatcher as an alternative to 
 Hogwasher. It's a less competent tool for binaries, but if you want a 
 good Mac newsreader with highly flexible filtering for text newsgroups, 
 it is one of the best in that role. 
  
 -- 
 Now where did I hide that website... 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
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