Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> writes: > Either way -- it was still a change from "expiration at some > date"... Though since (Netcom/Mindspring)Earthlink seems to have > subcontracted NNTP service to Giganews (or some such) it wouldn't > surprise me to learn that service also keeps a mammoth archive...
I'm not sure it's really a change, or if it is, it certainly isn't a change from how things were originally. "Expiration at some date" was never any sort of global policy for Usenet - just an aspect of a individual news server. Some servers held messages for long periods, particularly for the big seven groups - it's true that alt.* and in particular the binaries, might expire quickly. I know I certainly ran some servers that didn't bother expiring - or had expiration times in years - of the big seven. My experience post-dates the great renaming, so I can't speak to before that, but don't think behavior was very different. Individual messages could include an Expires: header if they wished, but even that was just a suggestion. Any actual expiration was due to local configuration on each news server, which while it could take Expires: headers into account, was just as often driven by local storage availability or the whims of the local news admin :-) I think Deja News was providing web access to their archive from the mid-90s on (so quite a while before Google even existed) so certainly by that point everyone had access to a rather complete archive even if messages had expired on their local server. I think Deja was also the first to introduce X-No-Archive. But other archives certainly existed pre-Deja, which I'm sure is, in large part, how Google was able to locate and incorporate the older messages into their system after their acquisition of the Deja archive. -- David -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
