Usenet Explorer

I am more than just a bit lost here with UE, and need some understanding of how it is working, which is, to put it mildly, at bit embarassing. I've been using the usenet for at least 10 years, and have, for the vast majority of that time, been happily using XNews; but finally decided to move away from its restrictions. Now with UE, I seem to not know anything about what I am doing, so how about a few definitions, what is the difference/similarities within UE of ...
Downloading and Saving
Deleting and Clearing
Marking something "Old" vs an article that has been "read"
What is the purpose/intention of "Deleting headers and bodies"?
What is the DB for? (what goes into it)
Is ther a way to re-read a sub-set of headers (date range, poster, etc)?

Thanks, any help would be appreciated
Zortag

probably you need to check getting started on the UE webpage first.

new, read, deleted are three ways to mark headers (with different behaviour corresponding to the meaning of the action)

old, unread and not marked as deleted means the header doesn't have those flags.

purged means to remove headers from the database completely but for large binary newsgroups (compact binary newsgroup type on creation) it is not needed or effective in reducing RAM usage because the program is optimized for large newsgroups .

database keeps exact state and downloaded article bodies as long as you need them so you don't need to download headers or bodies after program restart.

you can redownload subset of headers if you define range of headers (not absolute article numbers which is impractical, but relative to the newest headers) or date range (absolute or relative) in edit menu->propeties->newsgroups, what is better though is to download all headers (or set header "range" e.g. 50M last headers), then delete those you don't need (mark as deleted) when you need old headers you check "del" in the quick filter bar (view menu->quick filter to toggle) then select deleted headers you need and undeleted them from context menu->advanced->undelete headers.

maybe it is a mistake to try to embrace all options available, you need to start with basic usage (e.g. open newsgroup, download headers, download&save attachments with unpack engaged automatically as it is by default), then if you need something else you could try other options, if something is there it doesn't mean you need to use it.