FAQ: Browsing and Reading

How do I mark and retrieve all messages in certain groups?

There are two ways to do this:

If you want to do this on an ad-hoc basis after you've retrieved the headers, press Ctrl+A to select all of the headers and then select Online | Get Marked message Bodies, or message | Mark for Retrieval.

If you always want to get the bodies automatically for a particular group, select the group and use the Group | Properties option to open the Group Properties dialog. On the Retrieving page, check "Override default settings" and then check "Retrieve bodies for all new messages."

If I retrieve new headers, but I don't read any messages, how do I prevent the headers from being marked as read?

By selecting Group | Default Properties (or Properties if behavior is desired only in current group) and removing the X from the "New message Headers" box in the "Marking messages Read" category.

What does the "Catch Up" option do?

Here's the question that one of our beta testers sent us:

> I was wondering if I could get an explanation of the function of the
> catching-up choice in the online menu.  If, after being away, you want
> to "catch-up" what is the difference in using this choice and the mark
> all messages as read choice?

Agent remembers the number of the last message it has retrieved from the news server. When you "get new headers", Agent gets all higher-numbered messages. The Online | Catch Up With Selected Groups command queries the server to find out the highest number, but does not retrieve any headers, so that the next time you get headers, you'll only get messages posted since you did the catch up.

The message | Mark All messages Read command simply marks as read (changes them from red to black) all messages that you have already retrieved. It doesn't affect which messages Agent will retrieve the next time you contact the server.

BTW, another way to "catch up" is to open the Default Group Properties dialog and temporarily change the "Limit number of headers per session" value. That way, you can catch up by retrieving, say, no more than 50 of the most recent messages per group.

How do the auto-thread-expand options work?

There are two options on the Navigation tab of the Options | Preferences dialog box that determine whether threads are displayed in expanded or collapsed form:

Show threads initially Collapsed: If you check this option, all threads will be shown collapsed when you first open a newsgroup. If you un-check it, they will all be shown expanded.
Automatically expand threads containing new messages: If you check this option, threads will be expanded when you jump into them with the "Skip to/View next unread" commands. They're expanded only if you've already retrieved and read the first message in the thread -- the idea here is to avoid expanding threads that you've never seen before (and forcing you to step through them one message at a time). Only threads that you've previously shown an interest in are expanded.

This feature has been confusing a lot of our beta testers, and we're looking at ways to make it simpler. In addition, the option to automatically expand threads when you jump into them doesn't seem to work if you are in three-pane mode and have the focus in the body pane. Keep watching these pages.

My messages aren't being marked as read in the new release.

We have changed the criteria that Agent uses when automatically marking a message as "read". The following options have been added to the Preferences | Navigation dialog:

Automatically mark messages read:
( ) Whenever the message body is visible in the Message pane
(x) Only when the Message pane is selected
( ) Never

We have chosen the second option, "Only when the Message pane is selected", as the default in order to avoid inadvertently marking articles read when you happen to select them in the Message List pane. You can change it back to the old behavior by selecting the first option.

Why does it jump when I Mark or Ignore an message?

This is caused by one of the new navigation features added in version 0.46. Agent automatically skips to the next unread message when you mark a message for retrieval or ignore a thread. If you do not like this behavior, you can disable it by selecting Options | Preferences and clicking on the Navigation tab. Now click on the Marking or ignoring a message skips to the next unread message option to remove the check mark and press OK to dismiss the dialog box.

Why doesn't the date appear in the message list?

Actually, the date does appear to the right of the message header. If you use the multi-paned view, it is probably off the right of your screen. Try using Zoom mode. Choose the Navigate | Zoom Window menu item, or click the maximize button in one of the individual panes. Agent is pretty smart about switching back and forth between the panes automatically, and you can switch manually by clicking on the tabs at the top of the window.

Why don't I see the Date or Author fields in the browser? [Agent only]

Starting with Agent version .99a, we've made the Message List pane sortable by Date, Author, Subject and Size, and allowed you to select this by clicking on the respective column headers. For example, to sort by Author you just click on the header for the Author column.

However, this required us to change the format somewhat, by adding an Author column instead of simply appending the author's name to the end of the message subject as we previously did. Depending on how you have your screen layout set, this may cause some of the columns to not fit in your window any more. To see them again, Zoom the pane to fill your screen and readjust the column widths by using the mouse to drag the header separators to the desired location.

Why can't I make the status column smaller?

In addition to the line count, the status column has to display all of the message status icons (Mark, Watch, Ignore, Keep, Thread, Body). We've limited the minimum size of the column so that there is room for all of these. We found that if we didn't do that, new users would make the column so small that some of the information would disappear and then they'd get confused because it was missing. You can also use the Zoom command, which can be handy to make the message browser fill the entire window and give you maximum width for the subject column.

How do I suppress the header details when I'm reading a message?

Remove the checkmark from the message | Show All Header Fields menu item (or use the right mouse button to bring up the speed menu and remove the checkmark from the Show All Header Fields item). This will start the message just after the header.

Note that this won't eliminate a header that somebody else quoted and included in the message. That makes it into part of the message body, where it is always displayed.

Why does some word-wrapped quoted text appear in the wrong color?

When you're viewing a message that contains quoted text, you may sometimes notice that the text is word-wrapped and that the wrapped lines appear in black instead of blue (or whatever color you've chosen for quoted text). This is actually a problem with the message itself, not with Agent.

This happens when the newsreader that created the message decides to word-wrap the quoted text and does not put a ">" at the beginning of the wrapped lines. Because they don't start with the quote character, Agent has no way of knowing that they were originally part of the quote, and so it displays them in black. (To prevent you from perpetrating erroneous quotations like this, Agent doesn't wrap quoted text. See the section on word-wrapping in the editor for more information about that.)

If Agent wraps part of a quoted line, it does not provide a ">" character but still displays it in blue. It can do this because it knows that the new line is really part of the quoted line above it.

How does word-wrap work when I'm reading an message?

The message | Word Wrap menu item (or the Word Wrap item on the speed menu that you get by clicking the right mouse button while viewing a message) determines whether the message text is displayed word-wrapped. If word-wrap is on, all of the text will be visible no matter how small your display window is, but it may be hard to determine the message's original format. If word-wrap is off, the message will appear in its original format but you may have to use the horizontal scroll bar to see all of it.

Why do long messages appear to be truncated?

If you download a very large message, the display may only show the first part of it (the first 60,000 characters), followed by the message

[Sorry!
 This version of Agent cannot display messages longer than 60k bytes.
 We will remove this restriction in a later version.
 In the meantime, you can view the entire message by
 printing it or by saving it as a file.]

The entire message has actually been downloaded, and if you save or print it, it will appear in its entirety. The restriction affects only the display, and will be fixed in a later release.

Why do I get "This message is no longer available" errors?

This means that your news server no longer has the message that you just tried to download. This can easily happen if you have your purging settings defined to keep message headers for a fixed number of days or to never purge them at all (see the Purging tab on the Group | Properties dialog box). Because news servers keep messages for an unpredictable amount of time, the only safe settings are Purge All and Purge messages no longer available on server.

In earlier versions of Free Agent, misleading information from the server could also cause this problem even if you had the Purge messages no longer available on server option set. The following topic describes the reason for this and the fix that we implemented in Free Agent 1.0 / Agent .99.

Why do the latest versions retrieve headers more slowly?

One of Agent's purging options is "When the message is no longer available on the server". In previous versions (prior to Free Agent 1.0 / Agent .99), it would do this by checking the range of available messages reported by the server and purging all messages whose numbers were before the available range. For example, if the server reported that messages 204-566 were available, Agent would purge all messages with numbers 203 or less.

But our beta testing showed that in many circumstances there would be gaps in the reported range of messages. This would typically happen when one message was posted in a way that would cause it to remain on the server much longer than normal. This could happen if a message was posted with an explicit expiration date, or if a message was cross-posted. (In many cases, cross-posted messages are not deleted from any groups until they are deleted from all groups.)

These gaps would cause Agent to think that messages were still available when they really weren't. This would cause two problems for the user. First, you might try to retrieve the body for one of these messages and then have Agent report that the message was no longer available. Second, Agent would fail to purge large numbers of messages if there were really big gaps in the range.

In the latest release of Agent, we solved these problems by having Agent request a complete list of messages from the server. With this list, Agent is able to purge all messages no longer available, even if there are gaps in the numbering range. Agent gets the list of messages as part of the get-new-headers operation, after it has retrieved header information about new messages.

Our tests showed that retrieving a complete list of messages adds only a few seconds to the retrieval time for most groups. However, we have also found that some news servers are very slow to return the complete message list. If you've noticed that Agent pauses during get-new-headers, then you probably have one of those servers. You can eliminate the delays by turning off the Always get complete list of server's available messages option on the Group Properties | What to Purge dialog. This will make Agent work the way it used to. The downside to turning off the option is that the "no longer available" purging option may fail to purge all unavailable messages, leading to the problems discussed above.

Why does it take so long to update a group after retrieving headers? [Agent only]

Agent now allows you to sort your newsgroups by Author, Date, Subject and Size as well as by Thread. However, it needs to have the group in Thread order to insert new headers into it, so it can do things like respect Ignored and Watched threads. If you have the group sorted by anything except Thread, Agent has to sort it into Thread order, update it with the new headers, and then re-sort it back into your original order. On some systems this can take a considerable time, especially with large newsgroups.

You can tell that this is happening if you have your newsgroup sorted by something other than Thread, the actual header retrieval (with the moving progress indicator) happens at the normal speed, and there is then a very long pause while the status bar says "Updating <newsgroup>".

What do I do about a "too many messages to retrieve" error? [Free Agent only]

This error message is displayed if the sum of the messages currently in Free Agent's database for the group and the total number of new messages that may be retrieved (i.e. the total number of messages in the range of new messages available from the server) is greater than 32,000. Of course, the total number of messages you end up with after the retrieval may be less than this. For example, Free Agent may end up purging some old messages, and there may be gaps in the range of available messages. But Free Agent has to prepare for the worst, which entails allocating enough space to store all old and newly-retrieved messages. Here are the workarounds:

Tell Free Agent to retrieve a smaller number of messages. You can do this with the Online | Sample... menu option, or by setting the Limit number of headers retrieved per session parameter on the Retrieving tab on the Group | Default Properties for All Groups dialog to a value like 15,000. This works well if this is the first time you have visited a group, and you are thus trying to retrieve all available messages. Once you're caught up, the number of messages retrieved in future sessions will be much smaller. (And besides, you're probably not going to read 32,000 messages anyway!)
Do a manual purge before getting new messages.

(After the above was written, we made the software smarter so that it displays the error only in the rare cases when there really will be 32,000 messages after the download. Because we did this between the Free Agent 1.0 and Agent .99 releases, all Agent versions have the new, improved logic but all Free Agent versions still have the old code. The fix will automatically be included in the next Free Agent release, but for now Free Agent users may need the above workaround.)

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