Rick "Nutcase" Rogers said:
Post using the message ID, like yours from this message is:
"Kenny" wrote in message ...
Understand that the above URL will use your default news account.
If you have more than one than you may not end up opening the group
under the news server that you wish. If your default newsserver doesn't
carry the group (with the post with that Message-ID), you will see an
error popup. Outlook Express will not go searching through your other
non-default news accounts for the post.
To take someone to a particular newsgroup, use where
<newsgroup> is the full dotted name of the newsgroup. To take them to a
particular post, use where <messageID> is the value
for the Message-ID header in the post (without any enclosing brackets).
Because the format takes you to a particular post with
that article, the recipient or user of your URL link may not find
the article. Their NNTP server may not retain articles as long as
yours. Your NNTP server may retain posts in text-only groups for a
month and binary posts for 2 weeks but perhaps the user of your URL uses a newsserver with retention intervals of only 10 days for
text-only groups and only 3 days for binaries. The user of your link
won't find the article. Also, it takes time to propagate an article
around to all the worldwide collection of servers. If you give someone
a URL to a post that hasn't shown up yet at their NNTP server then
they also won't be able to see the post and instead get an error popup.
Posts on NNTP servers are transitory. The URLs expires quickly.
The above are the URL syntax forms described in RFC 1738. There is also
the possibility that the person that gives the URL has a
newsserver with a group that the recipient does not have. If your
newsserver doesn't require a login, you can specify the newsserver in
the URL, as in:
news://msnews.microsoft.com/
[email protected]
This only works in some NNTP clients, like OE. I believe the correct
syntax is (described also in RFC 1738, sec. 3.7):
nntp://<host>[:<port>]/<groupname>/<article-number>
Outlook Express handles it (but I don't specify the groupname parameter)
but I haven't tested all other NNTP clients to see if it works for them.
Unfortunately a side-effect is that a new news account may be created.
If you created a news account using the msnews.microsoft.com server name
but gave that account the name of "Newsgroups - Microsoft Public",
clicking on the link will create a new news account by the name of
"msnews.microsoft.com" although you already have an account using that
newsserver. Outlook Express doesn't bother to check if the newsserver
specified in the URL is already one that is used in one of your news
accounts in Outlook Express.
If you can find the post or thread in Google Groups, you might want to
instead provide a URL to the Google Groups copy of the post or thread.
Have a read at
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/HTML3.2/news.html.