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  Refresh all newsgroups Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2026-10-05 09:48 +0100
    Re: Refresh all newsgroups Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2026-10-05 10:09 +0100
      Re: Refresh all newsgroups Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2026-10-05 14:32 +0100
        Re: Refresh all newsgroups Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2026-10-05 15:18 +0100
          Re: Refresh all newsgroups Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2026-10-05 17:01 +0100
        Re: Refresh all newsgroups "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-10-05 16:54 +0100
    Re: Refresh all newsgroups Arkadiusz 'Black Fox' Artyszuk <asdfadsasdfa@atomicmail.io> - 2026-10-05 11:19 +0200

#22192 — Refresh all newsgroups

One of the few things that Outlook Express could do that Thunderbird 
can't was to refresh all newsgroups in a server at once. I often find 
that, after a month or two, I've got hundreds of old messages in threads 
that I've no further interest in, spread across a dozen newsgroups. At 
present the only way of removing these is Properties | Repair Folder | 
Download headers. This, however, can only be done one newsgroup at a time.

I'm pretty sure that this has been raised with the Thunderbird devs 
before. Does anybody know if it's just not possible, or could be done 
but is low on any priority list?

-- 
Jeff

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#22193

Jeff Layman wrote:

> I often find that, after a month or two, I've got hundreds of old 
> messages in threads that I've no further interest in, spread across a 
> dozen newsgroups. At present the only way of removing these is 
> Properties | Repair Folder | Download headers. This, however, can only 
> be done one newsgroup at a time.

Tools >
Account settings >
[particular server] >
Synchronisation & storage >
Retention policy

then either set it to delete messages more than nnn days old, or delete 
all but the most recent nnn messages

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#22197

On 05/10/2026 10:09, Andy Burns wrote:
> Jeff Layman wrote:
> 
>> I often find that, after a month or two, I've got hundreds of old
>> messages in threads that I've no further interest in, spread across a
>> dozen newsgroups. At present the only way of removing these is
>> Properties | Repair Folder | Download headers. This, however, can only
>> be done one newsgroup at a time.
> 
> Tools >
> Account settings >
> [particular server] >
> Synchronisation & storage >
> Retention policy
> 
> then either set it to delete messages more than nnn days old, or delete
> all but the most recent nnn messages

Thanks. I'd forgotten about that, but I really do not like using 
automatic deletions on anything - I much prefer manual control. If 
anything suddenly gets borked, at least I know when and probably why it 
occurred.

Just out of interest, I thought I'd try it on the Solani news server 
using it for "manual" deletion by setting it to only retain one message, 
and then once done return to "Don't delete any messages". That required 
quite a lot of key presses, but did work, although not how I expected.

Firstly, nothing seemed to have happened when I returned to the server 
pane. All the Solani server messages were still there. I went back to 
the Sync and Storage setting, and tried again. Still no joy. So I went 
to read an email which had just come in, and after doing that noticed at 
least half the Solani NGs had no messages - not even 0/0 stated. 
However, any which had had unread messages still had them, and all the 
read messages in the same NG were still there. Then, when I tried to 
download messages for that server to repopulate the empty NGs (File | 
Get New Messages for) nothing happened. The only way I could get 
anything downloaded to the empty NGs was using Properties | Repair | 
Download!

I'd be interested to see if you get the same result.

-- 
Jeff

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#22199

Jeff Layman wrote:

> I'd be interested to see if you get the same result.

I ave the per server retention setting as "don't delete any" but I then 
have per group retention overrides for the busier groups to e.g. 465 
days, and looking at one of those groups it does seem to keep it culled 
to that age of message ...

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#22204

On 05/10/2026 15:18, Andy Burns wrote:
> Jeff Layman wrote:
> 
>> I'd be interested to see if you get the same result.
> 
> I ave the per server retention setting as "don't delete any" but I then
> have per group retention overrides for the busier groups to e.g. 465
> days, and looking at one of those groups it does seem to keep it culled
> to that age of message ...

I just tried it on another news server and it did delete all messages 
for the one NG I am subscribed to, even though it had 100/100 
read/unread messages. However, the deletion wasn't obvious until I had 
left that server and gone somewhere else (as I found earlier), and again 
it was not possible to redownload any headers without repairing first.

-- 
Jeff

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#22203

On 2026/10/5 14:32:17, Jeff Layman wrote:
> On 05/10/2026 10:09, Andy Burns wrote:
>> Jeff Layman wrote:
>>
>>> I often find that, after a month or two, I've got hundreds of old
>>> messages in threads that I've no further interest in, spread across a
>>> dozen newsgroups. At present the only way of removing these is
>>> Properties | Repair Folder | Download headers. This, however, can only
>>> be done one newsgroup at a time.
>>
>> Tools >
>> Account settings >
>> [particular server] >
>> Synchronisation & storage >
>> Retention policy
>>
>> then either set it to delete messages more than nnn days old, or delete
>> all but the most recent nnn messages
> 
> Thanks. I'd forgotten about that, but I really do not like using 
> automatic deletions on anything - I much prefer manual control. If 
> anything suddenly gets borked, at least I know when and probably why it 
> occurred.
[]
I'm the opposite. I too don't on the whole like automatic deletion -
certainly for emails - but for news postings, I have a short expiry date
set, and star any post I find useful/interesting.

I suppose I think of it as like getting a daily newspaper (or several of
them); I keep any article I find interesting, but don't keep every issue
of every paper.

Not saying it's a better way - just what I was used to for decades,
using Turnpike. (That was a bit different in that it most definitely got
local copies of posts [except in groups you'd specifically marked as
headers-only], whereas quite what TB does is rather murky.) I have most
(I think all) 'groups set to  what was the TP default, 3 days. (I used
to set the Archers one to one day, as I sometimes got behind in that and
posted followups to ancient threads, which irritated some.)--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()ALIS-Ch++(p)Ar++T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

All change is not necessarily improvement, but all improvement is change.

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#22194

Jeff Layman wrote:

> One of the few things that Outlook Express could do that Thunderbird 
> can't was to refresh all newsgroups in a server at once. I often find 
> that, after a month or two, I've got hundreds of old messages in threads 
> that I've no further interest in, spread across a dozen newsgroups. At 
> present the only way of removing these is Properties | Repair Folder | 
> Download headers. This, however, can only be done one newsgroup at a time.

One can try alternative workarounds: Global Server Check: right-clicking 
the top-level news account name and selecting Get Messages checks for 
new headers across subscribed groups.
The other thing is instead of manually repairing and redownloading 
headers to purge old messages, you can try to automate cleanup. Go to 
Account Settings -> Server Settings for your news account and configure 
retention policies to automatically delete or expire headers older than 
a specific number of days.

> I'm pretty sure that this has been raised with the Thunderbird devs 
> before. Does anybody know if it's just not possible, or could be done 
> but is low on any priority list?

As for the priority of this matter, I'm afraid you're very close to the 
truth.

-- 
Regards
Arkadiusz 'Black Fox' Artyszuk

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