If you use or have used netscape to read news you should
read this message.

Contrary to popular belief disk space is not infinite.
Everyone knows that netscape is a pig but with respect to
reading news it has outdone itself.  Lately there has been a
number of incidents where the netscape newsreader has grabbed
up to 300 Mb of useless disk space.

One cause of this is a .newsrc file which specifies that one
is **subscribed** to thousands of newsgroups.  Under certain
circumstances, netscape will allocate a minimum of 16kb for
each subscribed newsgroup, depending on how many articles there
are in a newsgroup, and since there are ~24000 newsgroups this
could translate to 384 Mb or more.  (see .netscape/xover-cache)

We have better uses for disk space.

If you have ever used netscape to read news you should check;
Do you subscribe to more groups than you read and if so how big
is the directory .netscape/xover-cache?  The cure is:

- exit from netscape.
- edit your .newsrc file and remove the lines to newsgroups you
  don't read.  Alternatively unsubscribe (exchange the : for a !),
- remove .netscape/xover-cache directory  (rm -r)
	Causes news display options to disappear but will not
	loose track of which articles have been read.
- remove a file called .netscape/summary2.dat.
- fire up netscape news.
- exit netscape.
- remove .netscape/xover-cache directory again.

**NB**:	if netscape dies, as opposed to exiting, the summary2.dat
	file will not be created and you should go through the
	procedure again.

It is possible to get netscape to do this but the above is easier.

- fire up the news as you would normally.
- click on subscribe under the "File" menu
- click on the top group.
- scroll down to bottom of the list
- holding the shift key down click on the bottom-most group
- click on "expand"  It takes quite a while.  What this does is
  to expose all newsgroups
- click on the top group again
- scroll down to the bottom. (grab the scroll knob and pull it down)
- holding the shift button down click on the bottom group
- hit "unsubscribe"  For God`s sake do ***NOT*** hit "subscribe"
- It goes into some kind of reading fit so hit "stop"
- hit "Collapse All"
- now go find the groups you want to be in and subscribe to them
- hit ok
- close
- cd to .netscape/xover-cache/host- and delete hostinfo.dat.
  It will be regenerated with only those groups to which you are subscribed.

Other notes and details:

With a new invocation of netscape, when one goes to read news,
a file is created in .netscape/xover-cache/host- for every
"subscribed" newsgroup in .newsrc that did not appear in
summary2.dat.  (Or every one if summary2.dat did not exist)

The file summary2.dat disappears when netscape is started and
does not reappear until netscape exits.  Therefore if netscape
just dies then the next time it is fired up a file is created
for every subscribed newsgroup in .newsrc which can be in the
thousands if one has used some other newsreaders.

Some other news readers will fill in .newsrc file with every
newsgroup in existence.  What is more they fill them in
"subscribed" which is the source of the problem.

If you use netscape to read news it would better to not have a
.newsrc file at all.  If you don't have a .newsrc file netscape
will create .newsrc-news instead and subsequently pay no attention
to a new .newsrc file.

In any case be very careful that you don't "subscribe" to *ALL*
newgroups.  Even just looking at subscribe, under "file", will cause
a 1Mb file to be created in .netscape/xover-cache/hostinfo.dat.

I have no idea what happens if there are two netscapes running.

	Jim