Actually, it is.
: If this is the case, how can I reclaim some of this lost space? If it's
: not the case, I'll have to figure out what else might be wrong.
AFAIR there are two useful utilities for checking that. NNIGN (No News
Is Good News) draws simple statistics on your news.dat. The other one
(I never used it and don't know its name) can be used to shrink this
file, however with no guarantee Yarn will be able to read it :)
Both can be found at http://www.vex.net/~x/yirx/ if only this site
still exists.
.pk.