[Alpine-info] Are Their Hard Limits in News Group Articles?

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2022, Chime Hart wrote:


> Well, I am trying to open alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.dance in alpine. Yes it

> crashes with the following:

> [Opening "alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.dance" ... ]

>

> Problem detected: "Bad msgno 1000001 in mail_elt, nmsgs = 1000000,

> mbx={news.ord.giganews.com:119/nntp/readonly/user="gn319759"}#news.alt.binaries.soun".

> Alpine Exiting.


Ouch, yes, you hit an issue with limits in the c-client library (which is 
what Alpine is built upon). One million messages is all that the c-client 
libray supports. I am not sure where that limit comes from and I have 
never investigated it, but that is your problem here.


> Back again live, so are their either an article number limit or total 

> number of articles in a group limit? And more importantly, can I get 

> around these? Thanks so much in advance Chime


Yes, you can get around this. Press M S C and look for "NNTP range" and 
set it to the number of messages that you want to see in the newsgroup. A 
sensible number would be 500, say, to see the last 500 messages posted in 
the newsgroup.

I hope this helps.

-- 
Eduardo