"Bob Eager" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:45:16 +0100, dennis@home wrote:

"D.M.Chapman" dmc@puffin. wrote in message
...
In article , dennis@home
wrote:

The thread reference is so you can get your reader to go back and fetch
the
messages should you decide to read them.

No, that the Message-ID: header and the article number.

#256998 and "Message-ID: " in the case
of your post.

Its a throwback to the days of limited bandwidth.

No, that's the Message-ID: header and the article number. They are used
(IIRC, it's been a few years) by the ARTICLE command issued by your
NNTP client.


These days its quicker to just go and fetch all the headers.

All the headers? So everytime you start your client it's downloading
the thousands (tens of?) of headers from the group? I think not...

You think it goes and asks for them individually? You don't think it
uses the date to get new headers?

But you said *all* the headers.

And?
I didn't say it fetches them every time it starts up like you think it needs
to.
What are you a programmer? "Oh we saved a lot of disk space, we threw away
all the data when we closed the process"