Tumbleweed wrote:
"Tumbleweed" wrote in message
...

snip

Of course, NIN isnt perfect or infallible, I am sure there must
be
times its servers are down, or some of them. Just hasnt happened
to
me..... yet....... touch wood.....cross fingers.



I just knew I shoudnt have done that :-) look what I just got!

Outlook Express could not post your message. Subject ' Who
ordered the movies?', Account: 'news.individual.net', Server:
'news.individual.net', Protocol: NNTP, Server Response: '502
Temporary database problem. Please try again later.', Port: 119,
Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 502, Error Number: 0x800CCC17

Now, this is a reply, so I'll try again...hmm, its just gone so
must
have been very temporary.

Murphy's out today, lads! Its other occasional favourite is "Line 3
too long", which seems to indicate a particular thread has received
too many messages; when it's appeared, though, I haven't noticed any
consistency about the length of thread which triggers it. No apparent
consistency, either, about whether it will retrieve the message from
one's OE outbox with the next posting or the next synchronisation. So
I think it's a matter of the handling of transient conditions, and
probably a weakness left over from early days when Usenet was
smaller.

In case anybody would like it, I Googled the following list:

http://www.newsservers.net/FreeNewsServers.php?offset=0

I doubt if it's complete or up to date (it doesn't mention
news.individual's change to a modest charge, or Teranews's once-only
registration fee). There's also Google Groups, of course, but that's
a web-based news archive, rather than a client-based news server; but
it's better in some respects than it used to be as a stop-gap, and
the archive is very good.

--
Mike.