[NNTP] Article Numbers Becoming Invalid (RFC 3977)

[Sabahattin Gucukoglu]

Hi all,

RFC 977 makes no special mention of article numbers being no longer valid, but assigns a code 430 for "Article not found".  RFC 3977 does away with that code, but then describes the possibility of articles being removed.  It doesn't say why or how.

I'm trying to write a program that gets all articles from a group, articles numbered in ascending order, noting first and last reported by the GROUP response, and noting the minimum article number written into a user rc file that is updated with each invocation.
http://get.sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/newsfetch

Like a tool I used before, this is intended to get news into a mailbox, but this hand-written tool delivers them using raw SMTP that is a lot faster and more useful than delivering to mbox files.  Quite often I am getting errors from my news server about articles that disappeared but that are in the newsgroup's range.  Presumably, they were once valid.

How and why do articles disappear, and what can I do about this?  Shall I just ignore errors about invalid article numbers, or try to enumerate article numbers?  (Most news servers don't know about the listgroup range operand.)

Cheers,
Sabahattin