The K Desktop Environment

5.3. The Expire Settings dialog

The nature of Usenet news is that servers keep messages for only a limited amount of time, with the oldest messages dropping off to make room for newer ones. You can do this too, with regards to your local cache, to save on diskspace. It's generally sensible to set these items to something equal to or less than the number of days your remote server keeps articles, so as to avoid the frustration of trying to download articles or headers that are no longer there. You can use the "don't expire" flag to keep any articles of particular interest, as they will not be touched, regardless of the limits you set in this dialog. The numbers in the boxes are in days.

Article Bodies

How long to keep the bodies of articles you have downloaded into your local cache.

Read

How long to keep the bodies of articles you've already read. The default value is 5 days. You may wish to set this lower if you're not in the habit of going back through already read articles, to preserve your disk space.

Unread:

How long to keep the bodies of articles you have not read yet. How you set this depends on your reading habits. If you generally only read the very newest articles, you might set this one a lot lower than the default 5 days. If you only find time to read news every couple of days, you might like to leave it at the default, or perhaps even set it higher, so you don't miss things. You can safely set this higher than your remote servers expire time, because it applies to messages you already have in your local cache, but full bodies of messages take up an awful lot of disk space.

Article Headers:

How long to keep the headers of articles you have downloaded into your local cache.

Read

How long to keep the headers for articles you have already read. The default is 5 days, but the same criteria as for read articles probably applies. You may wish to set this a lot lower if you are low on diskspace.

Unread

How long to keep the headers of articles you have not read. There is little point in letting this be higher than the expire time on your remote newsserver, because you won't be able to retrieve the bodies of articles that have already expired there. You can still look them up using the "Look this up in Altavista" function, but in general, set this fairly conservatively. The default is 5 days, and for most text only newsgroups, that's plenty. Binary groups may have expire times as low as 24 hours on your server, so your reading habits have an impact on your decision here.

If you have plenty of disk space, the default settings of 5 days for all options are neither overly conservative nor overly wasteful. If disk space is your concern, lowering the value for read articles and headers will have the most dramatic impact on space, while not affecting your newsreading too much.

Click the OK to close the dialog and save your changes, and click the Cancel button to close the dialog without saving or applying your changes.