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Upon opening Thoth's preference panel (under the Thoth menu, and Edit menu, in Mac OX and 9
respectively) and you might quickly conclude that if its not broke, do not try to fix it.
That is not a bad start when dealing with complex software. A simple mistake can often
leave your computer spewing error messages and complaining about whatever it was you just
did. However, leaving preferences alone is like eating nothing but vanilla ice cream: you
miss out on a lot of interesting and pleasurable alternatives.
One of the most common settings to change is the number of downloaded message headers.
Whenever you double-click on a group in one of your Group Lists, Thoth goes out on the
server and fetches the subject lines for the next batch of unread messages. The number of
messages you prefer depends on several factors: how often you check messages, how many
messages were posted since your last visit (on average), the speed of your internet
connection, and your patience. Thoth's default is 500. The number can be found and edited
in the Preferences area, under the Newsreading Options pane, titled Maximum Number of
Articles to Fetch.
The number of articles to fetch is an especially important number when dealing with
multiple part posts. When a message with a large file attachment is posted, it is broken
up into small chunks that can be handled by various servers (many of which were designed
back when a few kilobytes was considered a large file). As long as the newsreader can see
all the parts of a multi-part post, the parts are reassembled by the newsreader as the
file is retrieved. However, a single missing part can cause havoc ranging from a corrupted
image to an unusable binary file. For that reason, its necessary to insure all the parts
of a message are available before beginning to download the messages.
Let us assume that a group you frequent has about 2000 fresh messages each time you look
at it. If you left the default number of articles to fetch in place, the group will be
viewed in 4 500-message chunks. If a multi-part file is split across several of those
chunks, it will always appear incomplete to the newsreader application. However, if you
change the number of messages to fetch to 2500, then all the messages posted since your
last visit would appear in a single list, greatly improving the chance that the file would
be complete.
While changing the number articles to fetch to a number larger than the most messages ever
posted between visits cuts way down on incomplete listings, it does not eliminate them
entirely. Sometimes files just get dropped on a certain server, and those will never be
able to be retrieved. However, often the spilt occurs across visits, so that you may have
already marked one or more parts of a multi-part message as read on your previous visit.
If that is the case, the file may still be found. Search on a part of the subject line,
which will find all the messages that contain that text, even those already marked as
read. If you are really desperate and want to review a large number of files, the only
alternative is to mark the entire group as unread, set the number of fetch articles sky
high, and start downloading. After finishing, be sure to put the settings back to where
they work best for everyday work.
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"How to Optimize Retrieving Multiple Part Message Attachments"
