Sue wrote:

"Mike Lyle" wrote
Sue wrote:
Not at all. I've not been near the computer this last weekend so have
only just got round to catching up with ngs. It couldn't have taken
more than 5 or 6 mins of marking and deleting blocks of clearly
nonsense headers.

Even quicker just to scroll past them. Unless you like to retain read
messages, rather than deleting all once you've got to the end, they
vanish at the end of the pane.

Absolutely, it's just that I like to keep read messages for a few days
in this group as I've found it's often useful to refer back to earlier
parts of threads sometimes.

They're still there, you just need to tell your newsreader to show you
all messages as opposed to just unread ones and they will magically
reappear as long as they're on the news server still.

In general when you read newsgroups your newsreader only maintains
statistics locally on your computer. It uses these to 'remember'
which messages you already read in each newsgroup. When you reconnect
(if you have it set up the usual way) it shows you only messages you
haven't read before. When you 'delete' a message all you are doing is
saying you have read it so you don't see it again. It stays available
on the news server until such time it passes the new server's expiry
time which may vary from group to group but is usually (for text only
servers) in the sort of 3 to 30 days range.

--
Chris Green