Newshosting shared some exciting news with uses earlier today by announcing that the service will support full header retention.  Their engineering team has been hard at work to make full headers a reality.  In the coming weeks users will automatically transition to the new set of article headers with different article numbers.  You don’t have to wait though since Newshosting will let you migrate over now.  We’ll show you how in a moment.

Would you like to go ahead and migrate over to full header retention?  If so be aware that you’ll need to make some changes both on the Newshosting site and likely in your Usenet client to accommodate the new article numbers.  The first step is to log into the Newshosting control panel and click the “Change XOVER Server” link.

The next step depends on your newsreader.  Here’s a summary from their new headers FAQ:

How do I get my newsclient updated with new headers?

Newsleecher: No problems detected when switching. However, this may not be uniform across all versions.
* Right-click and select Wipe Group Cache. You can then download the headers again.

Newsbin Pro: [16:07:55] ERROR – Server:NewshostingServer Reports bogus MaxGroup > MinSpool Groups numbers :878:338016 – alt.binaries.pictures.rail
Must unsubscribe/resubscribe to group
* Right-click on the subscribed group and choose Post Storage > Delete Stored Posts. Then you can download the headers again.

Grabit: Incrimental Update fails when retreiving new headers, causing all headers to disappear.
* Right-click on the newsgroup (or the server) and choose Full Update.

Xnews: old headers w/o already downloaded bodies fail to load.
* Click Group > Refresh Headers Special
* Select the entire range
* Select “Retreive and INclude read articles”
* Click Okay

News Rover: old headers w/o stored bodies fail to load.
Right-click on newsgroup and choose “Redownload list of available messages.”

Thunderbird and Outlook Express/Windows Mail have to have the group physically removed/unsubscribed and re-added.

Unison: Right click on the newsgroup then click “reset newsgroup”

If you’re new to Newshosting and would like to test out the service they are offering a 14 day, 30 GB free trial.

Our friends over at Newsbin provide a thoughtful guide on how to download headers with their client.  While you have some other good choices like Newsleecher and Grabit, we find Newsbin to be very good for headers.  Especially for groups that have a large number of headers.  Allowing you to download all headers or the latest in a group.  You can also easily search for newsgroups and subscribe to them.

With the popularity of Usenet search engines and binary clients like the Newshosting browser and SABnzbd I’m sure some of you wonder what we’re talking about.  That’s ok.  If you’re happy with the way you currently find Usenet content then just ignore this post and enjoy.  If you ever experience issues searching for content through other sites and client search engines then headers will be there for you to fall back on in the future.

Exactly what is a header anyway?  We’ll share a quick explanation without getting too technical.  Each article posted to a newsgroup includes header information.  You can think of Usenet headers being similar to email headers.  For Usenet a header will show information like the subject of the post, date posted, article number and list the newsgroups in which it was posted.  There’s more but that gives you a brief summary of headers.

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