Newsgroup search

[Russ Allbery]

Gary Lopez <gary at catapult.com> writes:

> I am using Thunderbird mail client and I am trying to search old
> messages in my newsgroup. The search feature only gives me the options
> of either Subject or From. I am trying to figure out if there is a
> setting in the configuration I need to change.

You probably need to change clients, since the server is already providing
more information than that.  The search is probably based on overview,
which by default provides the following headers:

    Subject:
    From:
    Date:
    Message-ID:
    References:
    Lines:
    Xref:

plus the article byte count.  You can add more headers to the overview
database (at the cost of having the news server send more data to most
clients whenever they read groups) by changing overview.fmt, but it sounds
like your client isn't even supporting all of the headers that are already
there.

If, however, you're looking for full text search, I'm afraid that the NNTP
protocol has no provision for that.  You'd need a client willing to
download each message in the group and search through it.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.