Throw a Weight in the Back?

Why in the world would you need to DL all the message bodies in an entire
group?? Seems like a real waste of time and storage space. I'm using OE at
the moment on a cable connect that the test on BandwidthPlace reports is
currently running 2.4 megabits / sec. Even that speed doesn't justify
grabbing all the bodies off a newsgroup to read the ones I might be
interested in. DL just the fresh headers when opening a group and a click
on a header of interest dl's and loads the message body with a time lag that
is just fractionally longer than if it was already on disk. IMHO, one of
the main benefits of high bandwidth full time connections is that it allows
you to work online in real time. That is, BTW, also an advantage of top
posting - throw away bodies for dl'd messages when exiting the news reader,
next time around when reading a reply the history is there regardless of
whether any of the earlier thread is still on the server or not or in your
local database. Sure it wastes a bit of bandwidth - maybe 1 or 2
milliseconds worth - but that's far less wasteful than keeping the history
of ALL the message bodies in a newsgroup of interest on your local storage.
Bulk storage retrieved as needed is the job of the server, not the client.

Even with a dialup connection, it makes more sense to do three passes - dl
headers, mark threads of interest, dl bodies, read and reply, and upload
replies, then purge read bodies on exit.


"Addison Laurent" wrote in message
...
For a host of reasons.

Largely because mostly its a lot of extra bandwidth used, for no real
informational increase. There are exceptions, and cases where it would be
useful. But those are rare. Many people download whole groups, due to
their setup - I'm on super-high-speed cable, and that's how I need to do
it - and downloading 5-40 times the information, ...