Hi Robert,
The screeen which you refer to is 'synchronization of newsgroups on
server'.
This screen does show the number of messages (unread and total) but it can
only show the message count in groups that are already subscribed to. The
challenge is to find out how many messages are in a group #before#
subscribing. I reasoned that if a group had only a small number of posts,
that it was not worth subscribing to.
Regards - Oppie

"Robert Aldwinckle" wrote in message
...
"Oppie" wrote in message
...
Is there any way to get OE6 to display the number of articles in the
newsgroup subscriptions box (or anywhere else for that matter)?


Maybe. Try an experiment? Open your list of subscriptions for
a news account (e.g. from one newsgroup press Backspace) and press
F5 (Refresh). What happens? E.g. do the numbers in the Total column
for any of your subscriptions change? (I just noticed that those numbers
would not be showing if you don't have them checked in that account's
columns dialog, so View, Columns and check Total if it isn't showing.)

Obviously, this test would be best done before connecting to any specific
newsgroups and the question is what does it do? I wouldn't trust the
troubleshooting log to show us if OE connects to the server and issues
some group requests for each newsgroup in the subscription but if it does
show you that, that would be your answer. The best diagnostic in this
case
would be an independent trace of the NNTP protocol layer, e.g. using
netcap. There are other possible answers using the different NNTP
requests, which I know the troubleshooting log does not trace.

Even without a trace you could infer whether or not the Refresh
actually caused some headers to be downloaded or not.
E.g. after doing it and seeing the numbers change, set Work Offline
and go into a newsgroup. Then see what the Status bar shows.
If the command only changed the counts the Status bar should reflect
that with additional qualifications such as "not downloaded", etc.


There are
so many usenet groups these days, many of them totally bogus and not
worth
navigating to. Nice to be able to see if there are any appreciable number
of
posts to a group before doing the download.

Thanks - Oppie



Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
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