Usenet Explorer

This just came up and I was wondering if there's a way to deal with it:

I had a large binary file (500+MB) I wanted to download. After doing an XPAT, I could only find it on one server. Since there was no need to waste time with messageID, I disabled it for all servers.

I then wanted to download some music, which would have been on several servers. Since I only download headers from one server per newsgroup, having messageID enabled would have facillitated things.

A workaround, I suppose, at that point (having messageID disabled) would have been to do an XPAT for the music files and download them that way. But is there a way of enabling/disabling messageID on a per newsgroup basis, rather than globally?

message-id direct doesn't consume significant bandwidth, so if with message-id direct enabled there is enough supply so it will download wth the full speed (it is usually the case) - there is no reason to worry here. It is not a problem to have many misses here.

OK, fair enough. It just seemed it was hanging things up, wading through all of the servers. Maybe I'm just being too impatient.

Does the retry setting on the servers properties page having any bearing on messageID? Or does NP just try once, and, not finding the article, move on to the next server (or give up)?

it doesn't retry if it is a definite failure like 'no such article', it retries on timeouts and other potentially recoverable errors including defined in properties->general, recoverable errors.

Thanks, Alex.