Usenet Explorer

Hi, I'm a newbie and am just about to purchase/run out of trial. I am VERY VERY pleased with UE! I can't believe how well it works on 100mil groups on my 6 year old computer! So stable and fast with all the options I want. Well done.

Anyway... I just was looking for clarification on how the puring/deleting/retention stuff works. I've searched and read a lot but can't make perfect sense of it.

I (think I) understand that 'Deleted' is just a flag on the header... not much different than 'Read' - at least from a database storage standpoint - it's still in the dbase.

I ~thought~ that purging meant that it fully removed that entry from the dbase, freeing up the associated memory. But in the UE.txt file, there seems to be indication that this may not be true in the compact binary groups, and I just don't quite understand what it means then. Does it mean that there is nothing I can do to free up that space from my database until the retention limit is reached?

Similarly, I thought the retention settings were effectively a way to have the system purge headers after a given timeframe. I'd like to leave my retention at 100days (per my server). But if I'm caught up on that newsgroup, I'd like to be able to manually select all the headers and purge at any given time, so my load ups and such will be faster and use less memory.

One other question... if I set retention to 100days and leave headers per server at 'all', will it behave the way I think (just keeping the last 100days of messages)?

Thanks!

If you don't want to keep info about purged or expired headers - just uncheck all check boxes in edit menu->properties->general->tracking expired/purged.

As to the second question, yes, you need to set retention and it is enough, in fact headers per server are used only when downloading headers, not for applying retention.

What you misunderstood reading UE.txt (in fact it is the opposite of what you suggested), for compact binary type even if you purge headers and tracking expired/purged storage is enabled - those green icon partials won't be put into the storage even then, since it would require tens times more RAM than if just to keep those headers as "deleted", effectively defeating the purpose of saving RAM for this newsgroup type.

OK, I think I get it...

If I don't have any tracking turned on, when purged, it's totally gone.

If I DO have some form of tracking turned on:
-Noncompactbinary: Keeps those messages sort of hidden away for the specified time period in case you change your mind.
-Compactbinary: To achieve the same function, it would have to revert internally to a less efficient mechanism of storage that would actually take up far more resources than simply keeping the message active with a deleted flag (for example). So it doesn't do this.

Thanks for the clarification. Now my only problem is worrying about Comcast shutting me off