Re: News.dat

Michael Gray (LabRat@i-link.net)
Thu, 19 Sep 1996 21:45:48 -0500

In article <3x8Pys+i7T1K090yn@stud-mailer.uni-marburg.de>, Oberboss@pprz02.hrz.Uni-Marburg.DE (Thorsten Oberbossel) wrote:
>In order to find help "Merv Curley" <mervc@pathcom.com> wrote:
>>This file has reached 11 + megs on my system and when I expire messages
>>it doesn't seem to get any smaller. I haven't found any mention of the
>>file in the Doc's [ but I often miss things ]. Does this file grow
>>forever?
>No, it doesn't. But you have to use the rebuild tool of yarn, followed
>by an "-s" parameter. This fixes the spool file "News.dat" and reduces
>the occupied memory to the necessary amount of memory for the unread
>data. >

This is a yes and no answer. My news.dat is ~37MB and is slowly
shrinking due to my resetting my personal mail expire date from 31 to
7 days. Another thing that can stall shrinking is a message with an
'Expires' header. Using the rebuild -s command will shrink the
database immediately, but will also reset the expire date of all
messages as if they were imported today (at least .91 did.) If you
decide to do this, be sure to expire everything you can BEFORE
rebuilding. Tim Middleton's NNIGN is a great utility for OS/2 users
(maybe DOS also - don't remember) to keep track of the size and open
space in the database. He keeps coming up with all sorts of useful
stuff - thanks Tim!

-- 
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