[Pan-users] Re: How do I get a header count for all groups?

[Jim Henderson]

On Sat, 01 Sep 2007 17:12:52 +0000, Greg Lee wrote:

> On Sat, 01 Sep 2007 08:47:46 +0200, Aniruddha wrote:
> 
>> ... If I understand you correctly I
>> select multiple groups in the group pane (with shift) and do a get N (1
>> day ) headers? It would be a nice workaround, only it will take
>> considerable more time (hours) then the old 'get header count option'
>> :(
> 
> That does seem to be the suggestion.  Not much of a work-around, in my
> opinion, since it doesn't tell you how many headers are available, and
> since you can't trust Pan to give you n days of headers (when I ask for
> 7 days of headers I get anywhere from a few hours' to a few years'
> worth).

I think there's a feature of the server that needs to be enabled for this 
to work.

> Since getting headers can be very time-consuming, very _very_
> time-consuming, I think what's needed is an estimate of the number of
> headers available, which does not involve actually fetching the headers.
>  From the behavior of the newsreader I used previously, I'm guessing
> that information is available from the news server.  I realize the
> disparity between the count of articles and the count of article parts
> would a problem ...

It is; if you telnet to port 119 and do a "list", you'll see the raw data 
- it's in the format

groupname highcounter lowcounter postingallowed

(I believe the last one is correct, but might be wrong)

For example:

opensuse.org.suse-linux.support.kde 0000002210 0000000003 y

In this group, the high message counter is 2210, and the low is 3; you 
can roughly estimate that there are 2207 messages in this group based on 
those numbers.  This will not account for numbers assigned to canceled 
messages, so it's not going to be 100% accurate.

Jim