Thunderbird settings

Go to Tools->Account Settings, find your news account and select Server Settings. There's an option that says "Ask me before downloading...." Set this to a big number (I use 10000, but if you want to pull everything on uk.d-i-y you may need a much bigger number) then click Ok and hit F5 to refresh

Thanks - I've done that without any change - it was set to 3000. From the message at the foot of the screen it seems to be only loading new messages -"There are no new messages on the Server" Rob

Ok, try unsubscribing (right click uk.d-i-y and select unsubscribe) then re-subscribe (right click the your server entry and select subscribe). It should ask you which headers to download (in your case it will say

If you want to get messages froma bit further back you sould have a menu option

File/Get Next $BIGNUMBER News Messages

you can repeat this to get older and older messages, within the history the server keeps.

Which server are you using? Some have better retention times thna others. NIN keeps a few weeks, BT keeps more. Some free servers only keep the last couple of hundred posts

When you unsubscribe, it may also help to delete the files relating to the newsgroup from your HD. There will be a uk.d-i-y.msf and a uk.d-i-y.dat file somewhere on your HD, which Thunderbird uses to keep track of what you've read already.

Check whether your system is set to show all of the threads. Go to the View menu, Select Threads then All. Does this fix the problem?

I've also joined the exodus to Thunderbird, but liked Google's layout. Is there a way to get Tbird to do the equivalent of Google's "Topic View", ie a list of thread topics sorted by the date of the most recent post on that topic, and when selecting a thread having the posts sorted by date, *not* by their position within the thread?

JGH

Hmm GG seems so borked at the moment I can't really work out what its supposed to do...

Basically you can control how stuff is ordered and presented using the View | Sort By, and the View | Threads menus. (you can also reverse the sort order by clicking on any column title - but that does not let you control the full range of ordering options).

View threads with unread will only show threads with unread messages. You can order them by "Order Received" which will place them in the order of the first post to the thread. You can immediately jump to the first unread post with "n". Received will order by the most recent. Selecting Unthreaded will let you have stuff in the order individual messages are received.

(a thread in pure date order does not really make any sense!)

You can also enhance your reading options with a few filters. e.g.

There's an experimental add-on called "Conversations", search for it within Tools/Add-Ons in TB, I've never tried it ...

Open Tools->AddOns...

There isn't a Tools->AddOns

JGH

is on mine!

(Linux)

Well there should be! Is there a "tools"? If so, what's under it? AFAIK it's only tools/options that becomes edit/preferences under linux, tools/addons should be different across platorms ...

^ n't

My TB 5.0 on Windows 7 64 bit has it. TB has been rock solid on Windows

Which version are you using? (5.0 is the current version)

That's Firefox not TB. TB is V3.0.11

Nope, TB5.0 was released at the end of June, and next week TB6.0 is likely to be released.

I am using TB 5.0 although I am aware some prefer older versions.

FF also 5.0

Both report they are up to date.

Nope that's TB as well - they are syncing the version numbers of both now.

Not any more...