[Users] [Bug 4133] trying to read message from an NNTP group (with all expired articles.

[noreply at thewildbeast.co.uk]

https://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4133

--- Comment #3 from Andrej Kacian <andrej at kacian.sk> ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> Client: GROUP comp.lang.python
> Server: 211 367 13887 14268 comp.lang.python
> 
> Above means that articles 13887 until 14268 might(!) be available.
> It's of no use to try to fetch an article outside this range,
> and an article need not be present!

That is exactly what Claws Mail is doing in order to learn what range of
articles to request from the server.

If you look in the network log at the beginning of that NNTP session, you will
see a GROUP command sent to the server, and a response, with a huge number as
"high water mark".

Claws Mail will then start requesting info about articles which are in range
between the last seen article it has remembered (or the "low water mark" if
this is the first time this newsgroup is being open), and "high water mark".

I will hazard a guess that this is a newsgroup on Gmane.org, which is known to
advertise absurdly high ranges of articles, despite most of the actual articles
not being available anymore. A RFC-compliant newsreader will then dutifully
request all the articles from the range advertised in the GROUP command reply,
which is what you see in the long snipped you pasted.

Now, until last year, Claws Mail just requested full range in one big batch,
which made the entire app look frozen for several minutes, while the server was
doing god knows what. (This also sometimes triggered bug in the middleware
library we use for NNTP[1].). Instead, we changed the code[2] to request
articles in batches of 5000, which allowed us to get rid of the long freeze, as
well as bypass the mentioned bug.

1. https://github.com/dinhviethoa/libetpan/issues/283
2. https://git.claws-mail.org/?p=claws.git;a=commitdiff;h=9729bf

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