Messenger Pro - USENET

I recently have been using Messenger Pro (7.06) and enjoy using it for e-mail and newsgroups. I use it with the venerable !Newsdir, whose version I have no idea.

Lately MPro has been displaying newsgroups with no unread messages in as having one or two unread messages. On opening these groups they contain nothing.

Two radio related groups always claim to have 2/2 messages, the more amusing one is a raspberry pi group which (Honest) display’s 3/14. Is this a known bug of archaic software (!NewsDir) or is there a way to fix it. Using Repair or Tidy does not solve the problem.

All the above is under RISC OS 5.23 (26-Jan-2017) running on the latest version of RPCEmu.

Cheers,
Becky.

!NewsDir is only a directory.

!NewsHound is used to collect to News.

Back in the good old days of !NewsBase (history lesson: !NewsDir even predates !NewsBase, being invented by !ReadNews – for the ultimately interested, have a look here: http://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/systems/acorn/riscos/comm/internet/news/old/), there was a possibility to reindex, which usually fixed such issues. Don’t know if this is also available in MsgServe, or if “Tidy” or “Repair” should do the same.

I would have expected Tidy/Repair to sort it out, but to follow up Steffen, there is a menu option for that window under Utilities called Rebuild ID index (I think). I don’t think I’ve ever had an instance where the totals were incorrect (after investigation), assuming group is otherwise error-free.

None of the above has made a change, the next thing I’m going to try is to unsubscribe and then resubscribe to the affected groups. Maybe that will help. Might even backup !NewsDir and try a fresh one, but that might be a PITA as I have a lot of old messages worth keeping.

Thanks for the suggestions.

but that might be a PITA as I have a lot of old messages worth keeping.

Is there no way to “archive” messages you want to keep?

Failing that, the way I used to do it with Argonet’s newsreader was to disable the newsgroup fetching (so it would start up inert) and then drop the entire application and its data files into an uncompressed archive (uncompressed for speed). Thenit can be copied to a CD-ROM or somesuch, and run when I wanted to refer to old messages.

Essentially, I kept archives by taking snapshots of the entire application. Maybe that’ll work for MPro? Just be sure to get all the data files, if they aren’t part of the application directory.

Thanks Rick and all. I think there is a way to archive the messages, but the problem was solved without needing to go that far. Unsubscribing and then resubscribing to the groups which had problems solved the issue.

Cheers guys.