News Rover Usenet Newsreader -- Search, download and decode Usenet newsgroup messages, jpg, gif pictures and MP3 music files

What's New with News Rover

News Rover Version 13.3, Rev. 0 is the current released version.

Click here to download the most recent upgrade installation file.

If you are currently running an older version, a registered user, and want the latest version, Click Here for instructions on how to upgrade. Note: If you are licensed already for News Rover version 13.x, you do not need to get a new key to install an update in the version 13 series.

Here are News Rover release notes, begining with the current version and going back in time, explaining the different enhancments and bug fixes that have been done to News Rover.

======== Version 13.3, Rev. 0: 7 May 2008 ========

Fixed a bug that caused serious display problems when News Rover was run with Vista 64 with SP1.

A pop-up error message is now displayed if News Rover is unable to store a file decoded from a message because the specified destination folder does not exist.

======== Version 13.2, Rev. 1: 16 Apr 2008 ========

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to hang in some conditions if the up-arrow key was used to try to move above the top item in the message display list.

Made additional improvements to the error retry facility.

======== Version 13.2, Rev. 0: 26 Mar 2008 ========

Improved the error retry facility so that logon errors are retried as well as download I/O errors. There is a new parameter on the Configure/Advanced screen that specifies the number of times to retry errors.

Changed the Configure/Server screen so that it is now possible to have two entries for the same news server. You can specify a server nickname to cause the two entries to have different display names.

Fixed a problem that could cause News Rover to crash if the Delete key was held down to delete many messages while other messages were being downloaded by the same group.

Fixed a problem that could cause News Rover to crash if the message list was refreshed while performing a Save-As or Move-To operation.

When event logging is turned on, News Rover now presents a screen with a button that can be clicked to copy the event log file specification into the clipboard.

Removed the option from subscribed newsgroups and Autoscan to not combine parts of multipart messages.

======== Version 13.1, Rev. 3: 29 Jan 2008 ========

The up/down-arrow and page up/down keys can now be used to scroll through the newsgroup subscription list.

Improved setting focus to the correct screen when viewing and deleting pictures in the File Attachments section.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if a file was launched from the File Attachments section and the file attachments section was closed and reopened while the file was being launched.

Modified the Configure/Server screen so that the Total connection limit is forced to be at least as large as the Subscribed or Autoscan connection limits.

Made a change so that the currently selected message is not changed when a download of another message finishes.

======== Version 13.1, Rev. 2: 4 Dec 2007 ========

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if the "Folders" item on the menu for the File Attachments section was clicked when there were no defined filing folders.

Improved the handling of arrow and Home/End keys in the search screens.

======== Version 13.1, Rev. 1: 21 Nov 2007 ========

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash when pictures were deleted while viewing them in the Slide Show viewer.

Fixed a bug that prevented the picture gallery display from being properly updated when all pictures were deleted.

Fixed a bug related to changing the encryption status of a group that had a file attachment larger than 2GB.

======== Version 13.1, Rev. 0: 6 Nov 2007 ========

Significantly speeded up deletion of messages when a block of selected messages are deleted.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if the Enter key was pressed while News Rover was busy deleting a set of selected messages.

Fixed the File Attachments screen so that you can right click and use "Move to folder".

Fixed a bug that caused the picture gallery not to display all pictures if it was opened in full-screen display mode.

Increased the size of the event log screen.

Increased the initial (default) size of the frame window for JPG picture display.

======== Version 13.0, Rev. 4: 23 Oct 2007 ========

Fixed a bug that caused the Message Text Locator to report that the search results has the wrong format.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if you used the internal JPG viewer to try to view a picture that had been deleted.

When a registration key was entered that enabled the Password Protection Option, the acknowledgment screen sometimes did not say that the Password Option was enabled.

======== Version 13.0, Rev. 3: 4 Oct 2007 ========

Fixed a bug that caused the picture gallery display not to be shown under some circumstances.

Fixed a bug that causes some screens to grow in height each time they were used.

Changed the JPG picture viewer so that the picture screen maintains the same size and position from view to view.

======== Version 13.0, Rev. 2: 5 Sep 2007 ========

Added controls to the Configure/E-mail screen to allow SSL connections to be enabled or disabled for SMTP and POP e-mail servers.

======== Version 13.0, Rev. 1: 4 Sep 2007 ========

We have done a major rework of the GUI look of News Rover. You can now select three different styles and several color themes. To select a style and color, go into the Configure/Styles configuration page. If you prefer the look of older versions, select the "Classic" style.

Support for Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connections has been added. To turn on SSL connections for a new server, go into the Configure/Server screen and check the box "SSL connection to port" near the top of the screen.

The File Attachment Locator and MP3 Music Locator search screens can now be resized. To change the size, grab the right lower corner of the frame with your mouse cursor and drag it around.

An automated (scheduled) search feature has been added to cause News Rover to perform File Attachment Locator and/or MP3 Music Locator searches on a scheduled basis. When search matches are found, News Rover can be configured to (1) automatically begin downloading them, (2) send you an e-mail notification message, (3) send an SMS text notification to your phone.

To configure automated searches, get into the File Attachment Locator or MP3 Music Locator search screen and click the "Set Favorites" button.

If you haven't already specifed a list of favorite search terms, add one or more favorite search terms.

Click the "Scheduled Search" button.

Enable the schedule search feature, select how often you want searches to be done, and specify which actions you want performed when search matches are found.

A new configuration property page has been added where you can specify default settings for new groups. You can specify default parameters including whether news groups should be password protected and encrypted, where downloaded files should be stored and the expiration period for groups. To set these defaults, go into the Configure/Defaults configuration screen.

The screen displayed when you use Save-as or Move-to now includes buttons allowing you to save all selected files without having to click the "Save" button for each file. There are also buttons to skip an individual file save and to cancel the entire save.

A yellow envelope icon is shown at the left end of message lines that have not been read. This makes it easy to browse the message list and find new messages. You can mark all messages as no longer new by clicking the yellow envelope icon near the middle of the toolbar. You can also set and clear the new message status by right clicking on a message line and selecting "Mark..." from the popup menu.

Messages you have posted and replies to your messages are shown in red in the message list.

When opening a .nzb from outside News Rover, you are now given the option of tagging the files for later download rather than starting the download immediately.

Improvements have been made to avoid memory size problems when downloading large numbers of message headers from big newsgroups. News Rover now pauses after downloading several hundred thousand headers, combines and stores them and then continues downloading more headers.

Several bugs have been fixed that could cause News Rover to crash.

======== Version 12.3, Rev. 0: 2 May 2007 ========

Improved the handling of socket connections so that fewer disconnections and reconnections are done.

Added a new parameter to the Configure/Server screen to specify how quickly to allow News Rover to open a new connection to a news server after a connection has been closed. Some news servers reqire a delay so that they can have time to decrement their connection counts.

A bug was fixed that caused sections of RAR file sets to be left behind when the PAR error correction system repaired a damaged section.

Autoscan message header scanning was slowed down when the parameter was set to limit how many minutes were spent scanning each newsgroup.

The message posting dates were not being properly displayed for Message Locator search results.

If a subscribed newsgroup was set to store downloaded files to an external folder and the "Save" option was selected from the popup menu to save a file to the default folder, News Rover could crash.

Fixed a bug in the parsing of .nzb files that could cause News Rover to crash if extremely long subject or group names were specified.

Added ".mkv" as a known multimedia file type.

======== Version 12.2, Rev. 0: 6 Mar 2007 ========

Two changes have been made for Windows Vista:

On new installations, News Rover prompts for the directory where its databases and downloaded files are to be stored. By default the directory is associated with the current logon account. This allows multiple copies of News Rover to be run from different Windows accounts. Upgrades do not change the data directory.
The Help system has been modified to work with Vista.

If an RAR decompression was started by double clicking a RAR file set and all of the sections had already been downloaded, the RAR sections were not deleted after the RAR decompression completed.

If an RAR file set was tagged for later download and decompression, the decompression did not take place when the downloads finished.

If an incomplete multipart message was tagged for later download, it was not downloaded when the downloads were done.

If an Autoscan interest group collected some parts of a multipart message on one scan and other parts on subsequent scans, the parts might not be combined properly.

Improved the retry and recovery procedure used when a news server reports the maximum number of simultaneous connections have been exceeded.

======== Version 12.1, Rev. 1: 23 Jan 2007 ========

News Rover could crash if a different newsgroup was selected while it was busy queueing a large group of messages for download for a different group.

Added a facility to track memory usage and provide detailed information if a memory exhaustion problem occurs.

======== Version 12.1, Rev. 0: 10 Jan 2007 ========

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to hang when running under Windows Vista when the last download completed while the Queue View display screen was open.

Fixed a bug that prevented the password protection and encryption options from working with filing folders.

Changing the setting of the option to download tagged messages on a scheduled basis did not always take effect until News Rover was stopped and restarted.

Fixed a bug that could cause files to be incorrectly excluded as duplicates if two or more Autoscan interest groups scanned the same newsgroups.

Made some optimizations to reduce the time for News Rover to start and exit.

Changed the default execution priority for multipart combine and RAR decompression to be "Normal".

A bug was fixed that could occasionally cause News Rover to crash if the message list for a group was refreshed shortly after some messages were deleted.

Added a progress dialog while encrypting or decrypting large files.

Fixed a problem that could cause some file attachments to become inaccessable if News Rover was moved to a different directory.

Speeded up queueing RAR files for download from the File Locator search screen.

Increased the size of the status bar field used to show the number of entries in the download queue.

Improved the automatic recovery done when the primary configuration file is missing or corrupted.

Fixed a problem related to downloading split-file message sets with unused .000 sections using the File Locator.

======== Version 12.0, Rev. 1: 18 Oct 2006 ========

Added a new option to the MP3 and File Locator search property screens to cause News Rover to pause downloads while a search is being performed. This can be turned on if the connection load from downloads is so heavy that it interfers with searches.

The options to enable/disable thumbnail picture generation and set the size of thumbnails has been removed from individual group properties and changed to be a global property. The settings are now on the Configure/General screen.

Improved the accuracy of the estimated message download completion time.

If the Home or End keys were pressed after the File Attachment Locator reported that no matches were found, News Rover could crash.

The display filter to show only new messages for the current session has been repaired.

Fixed a bug that caused the password protection and encryption checkboxes not to work with filing folders.

Modified the message "tagging" function so that incomplete multipart messages can be tagged for download.

If a directory on a remote compute is specified as a file save directory, News Rover never attempts to create that directory. You must pre-create it.

======== Version 12.0, Rev. 0: 11 Sep 2006 ========

News Rover version 12 includes a new, optional feature. The iPod/Windows Media Player option allows you to transfer files from News Rover into iTunes^® or Windows Media Player^® by clicking an icon on the toolbar. This makes it fast and easy to download music with News Rover and then transfer it to your portable media player. Note: iPod^® and iTunes^® are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Windows Media Player^® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Click here for more information about the Media Player Option.

Major improvements have been made to the message database structure to speed up the loading of the message list when you select a group. For large, multipart groups, version 12 is up to 10 times as fast as previous versions. Groups you subscribe to or create with version 12 will automatically use the new structure. The first time you run version 12, it will display a screen asking if you want it to convert your existing databases to the new format.

The File Attachment Locator now combines the sections of RAR/PAR and split-file (file.avi.001, file.avi.002, etc.) postings into a single line. The line will be shown with a '+' at the left end just like a combined line in a subscribed newsgroup. If you double-click the combined line (without expanding the sections) all of the sections will be downloaded and combined when the download finishes. If you want to download only a single section, click the '+' by the message to expand the list of sections and then double click the section you want to download. If you prefer that sections not be combined, click the "Search Properties" button on the search screen and uncheck the option box "Combine RAR, PAR and split-file sections". If you use the File Attachment Locator to search for large files, you may need to increase the maximum search hits that can be found. This is also set on the Search Properties screen.

News Rover's built-in PAR processor can now use PAR files to perform error correction and recovery on split-file message sets (file.avi.001, file.avi.002, etc.) as well as RAR file sets.

The maximum number of "hits" that can be returned by the MP3 and File Locator searches has been increased to 2000. You can set the search hit limit by clicking the "Search Properties" button on the search screens. Note: You must do a search using version 12 before increasing the hit limit.

You can pause and resume downloads. To pause downloads, click the icon with two vertical bars located near the stop-sign icon. To resume downloads, click the icon with the green right pointer.

The message queue display includes a new column showing the estimated download completion time.

News Rover can be set to automatically update the message header list for subscribed newsgroups on a scheduled basis. To do this, go into the Configure/Schedule screen and check the box "Automatically update the message list for subscribed newsgroups". Then specify the number of minutes between updates. If you wish, you can use the schedule on that screen to designate the hours of the day when scheduled updates are to be performed. If you wish to disable scheduled updates for some news servers, right click on the name of a news server in the left panel and select Server Properties. Then on the General Options property page, uncheck the box by "Enable scheduled updates of message headers".

News Rover has been enhanced so that it can take maximum advantage of dual and quad CPU systems. Message download processing, decoding, RAR decompression and other operations will now run concurrently on multiple CPU's.

If you are licensed for the Password Protection Option, you can now set News Rover so that a password must be entered to start it. To do this, click Control on the main menu followed by Begin Privileged Access mode, and enter your password to get into privileged mode. Then click Control/Password protection control and check the box "Require entry of password to start News Rover". News Rover will then prompt for your password each time it is started.

If you have the Password Protection Option but wish to disable it so that News Rover runs in an unprotected mode, click Control on the main menu followed by Password protection control then click "Disable password protection".

An option has been added to the NZB download screen to allow the files described by the nzb file to be tagged for later download rather than being queued for immediate download.

If a RAR file is decompressed and the name of an output file conflicts with an existing file, the new name is made unique by adding "-nn" to it where "nn" is a number.

Outgoing messages are now posted to the server in the order in which they were queued. Previously, the order was somewhat random.

A new option has been added to the Configure/Advanced screen to control what News Rover does when you use Save or Save-as and there is an existing file with the same name. The options are (1) warn before overwriting, (2) overwrite without warning, (3) add "-nn" to the file name to make it unique.

You can now set a message expiration period for messages in the in-box and out-box. To turn on message expiration, right click on the entry for "Received messages" or "Outgoing messages" in the left panel and select "Properties" from the popup menu. Then check the box that turns on message expiration.

You can now force the available parts of an incomplete multipart message to be combined. To do this, right click on the entry for the incomplete multipart message and select Combine/Decompress.../Manually combine parts from the popup menu.

A new animated icon is displayed by message entries while their parts are being combined or decompressed.

Several places where News Rover forced itself to the have the foreground focus have been removed.

When viewing JPG pictures from the message list, any currently displayed picture is now closed before a new one is displayed.

A new "Maintenance" configuration property page has been added where you can specify the time of day when you want News Rover to perform background maintenance tasks such as expiring old messages and incomplete pending parts.

An option has been added to the File Attachment Locator property screen to control whether PAR files that are not associated with any other files should be displayed in the search result list.

Message subjects and sender addresses encoded using ISO-8859 encoding can now be decoded.

When the display filter drop-down list is closed, the focus is transferred to the message list.

Shift-Home and Shift-End can be used to select all messages from the current position to the top or bottom of the list.

Left-arrow can be pressed while any message in a thread is selected, and the thread will be collapsed, and the first message of the thread will be selected.

After deleting a block of images from the picture gallery, the screen is now scrolled so the new selected image is on the screen.

The "Pause" key (sometimes also labeled "Break") can be pressed to pause or start timed display of pictures images in the slide show viewer.

Very rarely, opening or closing the download queue display could cause News Rover to hang.

If a message had more than one jpg file attachment, problems could occur when the pictures were deleted from the slide show display.

======== Version 11.3, Rev. 2: 15 May 2006 ========

The screen used to enter text when you post a message can now be resized.

Improved the way the picture gallery and file attachment list are updated when large number of files are deleted as a group.

When a file attachment is saved the associated message is now marked as having been read.

The newsgroup name was not set up correctly when replying to a message found using the Message Locator feature.

If a newsgroup was configured to store downloaded files directly into an external folder and it was set not to delete files when messages were deleted, then input RAR parts were not deleted after a RAR decompression was successfully completed.

Added "7z" (7zip) as a known good file type.

======== Version 11.3, Rev. 1: 21 Mar 2006 ========

The size of the screen showing the results for the MP3/File Locator search has been increased.

Speeded up the creation of .nzb files.

Alphabetically sort the subjects of files in .nzb files.

Corrected a problem that prevented the display of total RAR archive sizes greater than 2 GB.

Changed RAR processing so that it will attempt the RAR decompression even if the PAR error correction reports failure.

Added code to recreate the News Rover icon in the system tray in case the Windows Explorer screen display crashed.

The message count for a group was being decremented by one each time a multipart message download completed.

When viewing a full-size picture in the slide show, you can double-click on the image to close it.

If an error occurred while downloading any part of an RAR archive the RAR decompression was not attempted. Now the compression is attempted even if a download error occurred.

When files are attached to a message they are sorted so that the order is .nfo, .sfv, .rar, .par, .nzb.

The fields used to display the subject of a message being sent and the addresses of the recipients have been enlarged so that long subjects can be displayed.

Fixed the message expiration process so that it now expires and deletes downloaded messages that have not been read from full-body-download Autoscan interest groups.

If a message was queued to be posted to a news server and the send was held until later, then a second message was posted to a different server, both messages were sent to the same server.

Added a short sleep after socket closes to give the server time to decrement its connection count before we open a new connection.

You can type Ctrl-A while browsing the picture gallery to select all thumbnail images. You can type Ctrl-A while browsing the file attachment list to select all entries.

======== Version 11.3, Rev. 0: 15 Feb 2006 ========

Changed the connection retry logic to make it retry some server error conditions where status codes 430 and 403 are returned.

Improved the picture gallery so that left- and right-arrow keys can be used to move the picture selection. The Enter key displays the currently selected picture.

Fixed a bug that caused the feature that creates a subdirectory for each newsgroup to fail for header-only Autoscan interest groups when a multipart message was downloaded.

News Rover could occasionally crash if messages were deleted from the slide show at the same time that new pictures were being added.

Modified Autoscan background message processing and socket timeout processing so that they have less impact on foreground message browsing.

Fixed a bug that could cause the letter "S" to be inserted at the front of outgoing e-mail addresses when a send retry was done on a message addressed to multiple recipients.

Reduced the amount of CPU used when downloading while there are a large number of messages in the download queue.

Messages queued for download using the MP3/File Locator searches or .nzb files were not being added to the newsgroup message count shown in the left panel.

Enhanced the file size calculation so that the size is correctly displayed for downloaded files larger than 2 GB.

Improved the accuracy and consistency of download speed calculations. Also, corrected the time of statistics displayed in the Speed History section of the queue display.

======== Version 11.2, Rev. 0: 12 Jan 2006 ========

Improved background message part combining so that it does not interfere with downloading messages in other groups.

Modified .nzb file creation to make it compatible with some other newsreaders.

Fixed the newsgroup selection screen so mouse wheel scrolling works.

======== Version 11.1, Rev. 0: 3 Jan 2006 ========

Modified the operation of Autoscan to make it work better with TeraNews and MegaNetNews.

Changed the maximum connection limit on server property pages so that up to 50 connections can be specified.

Fixed mouse wheel scrolling in JPG picture displays and in the file attachment list list display.

Improved parsing of file names in message subjects to exclude currency amounts and IP addresses that looks like file names.

Defer the refresh of the message list for header-only Autoscan interest groups if there has been recent activity such as scrolling.

Increased the accuracy of the time spent scanning each newsgroup if a newsgroup scan time limit was specified for an Autoscan interest group.

Disallow expiration and deletion of messages while they are being downloaded, tagged for download or while they are waiting for RAR decompression. Also, do not expire and delete messages whose bodies have been downloaded but not read.

======== Version 11.0, Rev. 1: 14 Nov 2005 ========

Fixed a problem that prevented the Message Locator from working in some cases.

Modified the handling of message ranges for subscribed newsgroups to improve the performance with TeraNews and MetaNetNews news servers.

Added ".ts" as a recognized file type for multimedia files.

If an extra carriage-return character appeared on a message line, it could prevent a file attachment from being decoded.

When beginning to download a block of selected messages, News Rover now asks only once if you want to force the combination of the parts for multipart messages that have some parts missing.

======== Version 11.0, Rev. 0: 4 Oct 2005 ========

A new screen has been added to display a comprehensive view of the messages queued to be downloaded and currently being downloaded. Using this screen you can boost the download priority of a queued entry or give it a low priority. You can view the current number of connections being used for each message and for each news server. It also presents a graphical display showing the download transfer rate. To display the download queue, click the 10th icon on the toolbar which has a down arrow with horizontal lines. Click here to see a screen shot of the download queue

You can assign nicknames for the names of subscribed newsgroups and news servers. If a nickname has been specified, it is used for the name of the server or newsgroup in the left panel rather than the real name. To set a nicknane, right click on the name of a group or news server in the left panel and select Properties from the popup menu. Then specify the display name for the group or server on the main property page.

A change has been made to reduce the time required to load and display the list of messages for large newsgroups. The improvement doesn't affect the first load of the message list for a group after News Rover is started, but subsequent loads when you are switching between groups will be faster.

You can click in a URL in a message of the form "news://server/messageID" to open a newsgroup message.

News Rover now displays a warning message if you try to post a file attachement to a non-binary newsgroups. Most news servers reject messages with file attachments being posted to non-binary newsgroups.

A progress box is now displayed when you post messages with file attachments that have to be encoded for sending.

Timeout limits are now enforced for writes while posting messages to prevent News Rover from hanging if the news server does not respond.

News Rover version 11 can create .nzb files

A .nzb file describes one or more messages on Usenet newsgroups. Often .nzb files are used to describe a collection of files that comprise a RAR file set. By opening a .nzb file in News Rover you can easily download all of the files described by the .nzb file.

In addition to using .nzb files to download files, News Rover also can create .nzb files which you can then post to newsgroups or use in other ways. If you post a set of files, it is a good idea to create a .nzb file describing the files you posted and post the .nzb file to the same set of newsgroups.

The MP3 Music Locator and the File Attachment Locator features in News Rover are used to create .nzb files.

Step by step instructions for creating a .nzb file

Use either the MP3 Music Locator or the File Attachment Locator to search for some set of words that will be found in the set of files you want the .nzb file to describe.
If you entered a valid set of search words and the set of files has been indexed, then you should see a set of search "hits" that match your search. By using the Ctrl and/or Shift keys, select (highlight) all of the file entries in the search list that you want to include in the .nzb file description. Do not download them, just select their entries.
At the bottom of the search screen click the button "Create .nzb file".
A box will appear showing the progress as News Rover collects information about the file entries you selected.
Once all of the information has been collected, a screen will appear giving you choices as to whether you want to post the .nzb file to a newsgroup or save it in an external disk file. Check the boxes indicating what you want to do. Note: If you want to e-mail the .nzb file to someone, use the Post checkbox. Edit the name of the .nzb file to be whatever you want.
After setting the options you want and editing the file name, click the "OK" button.
If you selected the option to post the .nzb file to newsgroups, a screen will appear where you can edit the subject of the messge and select the newsgroups where you want the .nzb file posted. Do not specify the name of the .nzb file in the subject; News Rover will append the file name to the subject automatically. If you wish to send the .nzb file to someone via e-mail, click the "E-mail address" button and enter the destination e-mail address.
Once you have edited the subject and selected the newsgroups, click the "Enter message text" button.
A blank screen will appear where you can enter any text that you want to accompany the .nzb file. You do not have enter any text.
When you are ready to post the .nzb file, click "Send" on the message text screen, and then select the option to send the message immediately or hold it till later.

Bug fixes

If you selected a range of messages by using Shift-click and then used Ctrl-click to unselect a message in the range, unexpanded submessages under the deselected message were not deselected.

When the last message in the list was deleted and there was an unexpanded thread above the deleted message, the thread was expanded.

Occasionally, downloads could hang if downloads for Autoscan and subscribed newsgroups were both active and the total connection limit for the news server was less than the sum of the Autoscan and subscribed newsgroup connection limits.

The date shown for messages downloaded with the Message Locator was sometimes incorrect.

In some cases, file extensions of the form ".volnn+mm.par2" were not being recognized as valid PAR2 type extensions.

======== Version 10.2, Rev. 4: 26 Aug 2005 ========
Changed the Message Locator to adjust to a new format of data coming from the search server.

======== Version 10.2, Rev. 3: 11 May 2005 ========

The Message Locator has been fixed so that it can handle search results in the new format coming from the search server.

A .nzb file that was missing the "bytes=nn" specification could cause News Rover to crash.

A .nzb file could not be used to start a download from within a filing folder.

Removed the limit on how many spaces could be put at the front of a message subject to indicate thread replies.

News Rover could crash when trying to display summary information about a large multipart message that had some missing parts but more than 800 parts available.

======== Version 10.2, Rev. 2: 7 Mar 2005 ========

News Rover could hang during startup if it determined that there were some lost groups that needed to be recovered.

Improved the parsing of part number specifications in message subjects for Autoscan when there is both a part number in parentheses and a section number in brackets.

Improved parsing of the contents of some .nzb files.

News Rover could crash on startup if there were more than 2000 subscribed newsgroups and it attempted to recover a lost group.

Under some circumstances, News Rover could fail to remember the last message scanned in very large newsgroups, so it would rescan the last 5 days of messages each time it was started.

Using Ctrl-Shift-click to add a new message selection range did not work.

======== Version 10.2, Rev. 1: 14 Feb 2005 ========

If the "Skip Newsgroup" button was clicked on the Autoscan control panel, the scan could hang with a message about maximum connections being reached.

Improved detection and recovery for files left open when News Rover stopped.

The News Rover splash screen was not displayed during startup if the option was turned on to put News Rover's icon in the system tray.

======== Version 10.2, Rev. 0: 1 Feb 2005 ========

Added support for decoding BN (BommaNews) encoded file attachments.

Allow multiple spaces to preceed the period in a file name in a message subject if the file type is a recognized type.

News Rover could not properly decode some messages that had multiple yEnc file attachments.

Occasionally, database corruption could occur if a multiple message entry was deleted while it was being downloaded.

All of the section entries for an expanded RAR archive were shown in dim font if any of the sections were missing.

Allow file type exclusions to work for files downloaded by subscribed newsgroups as well as Autoscan interest groups.

Under some conditions when Autoscan and subscribed newsgroups were downloading, News Rover could make more simultaneous connections to the news server than specified on the Configure/Server screen.

Added a new built-in display filter for .nzb files.

Improved event logging for MP3 and File Locator searches.

======== Version 10.1, Rev. 0: 1 Nov 2004 ========

You can press F5 to refresh the message list for the current group.

When you double-click a single-section RAR file, it now displays the same screen as for a multi-section RAR file. This screen summaries what it it is going to do, and it gives you the option of downloading the RAR sections without combining and decompressing them.

If you select files or tag them for download (i.e., down-arrow icon by messages), the downloads do not decompress the RAR files -- they just do the download. You can double-click an entry to download it and decode it.

Missing parts for RAR archives were not being counted correctly, so some archives that had too many missing parts to be viable were displayed in the message list anyway.

RAR archives with missing sections were not shown in gray when the All Messages display filter was selected.

News Rover could crash if you viewed the message list for a newsgroup by clicking View/Messages on the main menu rather than selecting the name of the group in the left panel. This problem also could occur when viewing the E-mail Inbox or Outbox.

The default message filter for newsgroups whose names contain ".discuss" or ".request" is now All Messages.

======== Version 10.0, Rev. 3: 22 Oct 2004 ========

Added code to News Rover to correct corruption in yEnc encoded files caused by ZoneAlarm version 5.1. The bug is in ZoneAlarm, but they won't fix it.

======== Version 10.0, Rev. 2: 18 Oct 2004 ========

A confirmation box is now displayed when you begin the download of a split-file message set. On that screen you can select options to control whether the parts are to be combined after they are downloaded and whether parts should be deleted after they are combined.

The .000 section of split-file message sets is not included in a split-file combine if it is much smaller than the next section (this indicates that it has descriptive text rather than actual file data).

An option has been added to the Configure/Advanced screen to enable or disable the threading of sections of RAR and split-file message sets.

The 'L' key has been added as a keyboard shortcut to launch the attachment of the currently-selected message.

If a search is done using the MP3 or File Locator while in password protected mode, the search history is cleared when going into protected mode.

There were two entries for "All Servers" in the MP3 and File Locator search index lists.

The size of the Configure/Multipart screen has been adjusted to better fit with some screen resolutions.

======== Version 10.0, Rev. 1: 29 Sep 2004 ========

News Rover could crash if the message list for a newsgroup had a message with a .rev file attachment and no matching .rar file attachment.

News Rover could crash during the initial installation if a newsgroup subscription was done before getting to the main screen.

======== Version 10.0, Rev. 0: 21 Sep 2004 ========

News Rover Version 10 supports .nzb descriptor files. A .nzb file describes one or more messages or files posted on Usenet newsgroups. For example, a .nzb file might describe all of the files in a complete CD. Each file described by a .nzb file may be a multipart file, so one .nzb file may describe tens of thousands of individual messages. All of the information needed to download the files described by the .nzb file is contained in the .nzb file including the names of the newsgroups where the files are posted and the message ID for every message.

When News Rover downloads and decodes a .nzb file, it examines the contents of the .nzb file and generates a message summarizing the files described by it. This summary message is shown in the lower panel when you select a message entry that has a decoded .nzb file attachment.

If you open (launch) a .nzb file in News Rover, all of the files described by the .nzb file will be queued for download. If the .nzb file contains a list of RAR files, News Rover will combine and decompress the RAR files automatically after they are downloaded.

In addition to being posted on Usenet newsgroups, there are sites where you can download .nzb files. You also can transfer them via e-mail or IRC. The File Attachment Locator in News Rover can be used to search for and download .nzb files.

Version 10 of News Rover includes an auxiliary program named RoverNzb. This program associates itself with the .nzb file type so that it is launched when you open (double click) a .nzb file in a Windows folder or open it after a web download or from within an e-mail message. RoverNzb displays a summary of the files described by the .nzb file. You can click a button on the RoverNzb screen to queue the files described by the .nzb file for download by News Rover. Note that News Rover must be running in order to do this.

The sections of RAR/PAR archives and split-file messages (.001, .002, etc.) are threaded together and displayed as a single line in the message list. You can double-click the message entry to download all sections for the file and decompress them. This greatly reduces the number of individual message entries in the list for multimedia newsgroups and makes it as easy to download large RAR file sets as ordinary multi-part files. If you wish to see the individual sections, click the '+' shown at the left end of the message entry to expand the section list.

When News Rover downloads and decodes a .mp3 file it checks to see if there are ID3 tag fields in the file. If there are tag fields, they are extracted and shown at the end of the body of the message.

An approximate count of the number of messages in each newsgroup is now displayed next to the newsgroup name on the newsgroup subscription screen. In order to initialize the newsgroup message counts, you must click "Get-newsgroups" on the main menu after installing Version 10.

The design of the message databases used by News Rover has been changed to allow them to grow larger than 2 GB. This change only applies to systems using the Windows NTFS file system (Windows XP, 2000 and NT); older Windows systems using the FAT-32 file system restrict files to 2 GB. With the new database system, News Rover can handle newsgroups with more than 4 million message entries (there is no fixed limit). The revised system has been tested with a newsgroup having over 5.5 million message entries.

A considerable amount of memory space is required when first loading a large message list and combining the parts of multi-part messages, so News Rover is configured by default to download only 2 million messages at a time. Once that number has been downloaded and combined, you can click the 7th toolbar icon to download the next set of 2 million headers.

New newsgroup subscriptions will use the new format. To convert existing datababases to the new format, you must rebuild them. To do that, click Control on the main menu, then click Rebuild databases, then click Rebuild all.

The parts of multipart messages can now be combined as a background task. This significantly reduces the time to enter a large, multipart newsgroup where many new messages have been downloaded.

You can now select "All Servers" as the search index for the MP3 Locator and the File Attachment Locator. This will cause MP3/File searches to return hits if there are occurrences of the target messages on any of the news servers that we index.

Search strings used with the File Attachment Locator and MP3 Music Locator may now include three operator characters: '*', '~' and '^'

The '*' wildcard character can be used at the end of a word to match any characters following the first part of the word. For example, "Symphon*" would match "Symphony" and "Symphonies", etc. Note that you can use '*' only at the end of a word.

The '~' character can be used between two words to mean that they must be in close proximity to each other in the message subject.

The '^' character can be used in front of a word at the end of the search string to say that the specified word should NOT occur in the matching result.

There is a new option on the Configure/Advanced screen "Download oldest files first". If you check this option, then News Rover will download files in the download queue in the order of the date/time when they were posted. This is useful if your news server has a short retention period and you want to get the oldest files before they are expired and deleted.

After 60 seconds of inactivity for a newsgroup, News Rover flushes data to the database and puts the datbase in a safe, quiescent state so that it does not need to be rebuilt if an unexpected shutdown occurs.

Some e-mail POP servers send comment lines beginning with '-' as replies to commands. News Rover didn't expect this, so it terminated the e-mail receive when it saw the comment lines. Now it ignores the comment lines and looks for the actual command response.

If a message had a section number as well as a part number, it might not have been shown in the message list after it was decoded.

The default message-posting identity specified for an Autoscan interest group was not always being selected correctly.

Added a new checkbox to the Configure/Multipart screen: "Save incomplete expired entries in interest groups". If this box is checked, when News Rover expires and deletes old, incomplete pending-part entries, it first forms a message with whatever parts have been collected and stores it into the appropriate Autoscan interest group(s). This give you a way to collect incomplete multipart messages which possibly could be repaired with PAR2 processing.

Improved the Save-As and Save-In functions on the Configure/Multipart screen so that multiple file entries can be selected for the operations. Also fixed some bugs related to saving incomplete yEnc encoded files.

If a message was moved to a filing folder and the folder already had a file with the name of the file being moved and the move was cancelled, the file was deleted from the original group. This has been fixed.

The CPU time required by the downloaded scheduler to select the next message to be downloaded has been reduced.

======== Version 9.2, Rev. 0: 30 Mar 2004 ========

The checkbox to enable connections through Secure-Tunnel.com now appears on the configuration screen for all news servers. Also, you can now specify the prefix to append to the server address for Secure-Tunnel connections.

The Move-To function for moving file attachments to destination directories now gives a warning if the move would overwrite an existing file.

News Rover could crash if an extremely long (more than 1000 character) filter expression was specified as the subject matching filter for a Display Filter.

News Rover can now decode some MIME sections that are improperly enclosed in messages without proper MIME headers.

Under some circumstances, if a timeout error occurred while News Rover was downloading a message, it failed to send the command to reenter the newsgroup when it retried the download.

The function to save files attached to a message did not work properly if there were more than about 90 files attached to the message.

If you use News Rover's built-in RAR decompressor to decompress the RAR archive and the archive contains JPG images, thumbnails are created for the extracted images and added to the picture gallery.

If two or more Autoscan interest groups were set up to scan the same set of newsgroups, News Rover could crash if a multi-part message was encountered by one of the interest groups if it was set to download full bodies.

If a new message was queued to be sent while another message was being sent, the new message did not get sent out until the next send cycle was started.

The function to get new message headers for all subscribed newsgroups had a hard-coded limit of 500,000 rather than honoring the limit specified as a property for each newsgroup.

======== Version 9.1, Rev. 3: 3 Feb 2004 ========

If the subject of a message with a RAR file attachment had two part numbers in it, the message appeared to be incomplete after the RAR file was decompressed.

News Rover could not combine the parts of split-file messages that were parts of an RAR archive. These were messages with file names of the form "file.rar.001".

The function of the down-arrow icon has been changed so that it now starts downloading all tagged messages for all news servers. Previously, it only started downloading tagged messages for the currently-selected news server.

Enable the option to connect through Secure-Tunnel.com for Usenet.com news servers as well as Newsfeeds.com news servers.

Cleaned up a message subject problem in the Message Locator feature.

If a search through the message list was initiated by pressing Ctrl-F, subsequent deletes done by pressing the Delete key did not delete all of the messages in the selected range.

======== Version 9.1, Rev. 2: 12 Dec 2003 ========

If a server logon failure occurred, News Rover refused to try to perform any operation on a server for several minutes. In the case of Autoscan, this is a good thing, but it caused problems for subscribed newsgroups.

The expiration period set for duplicate file name entries was being used to control when file signature entries were expired rather than the expiration period set for file signatures.

Holding down the Shift key while pressing Page-Up or Page-Down did not select messages as the list was scrolled.

Added an option to the Configure/Advanced screen to control whether News Rover's home page URL is included in the header of outgoing messages.

======== Version 9.1, Rev. 1: 24 Nov 2003 ========

When combining the parts of a split-file message, if the message had a squence number in addition to a part number, the combined message appeared to be incomplete.

The maximum allowable connections to each news server has been increased from 20 to 50. However, note that very few news servers will permit more than 10 simultaneous connections.

The maximum parts in a multipart message that may be combined has been increased from 2000 to 2500.

Increased the maximum length of a file name that may be stored.

Previous versions of News Rover did not allow semicolon (";") characters in file names; this version does.

The operation of manually combining messages did not work.

In some cases, the download lightning-bolt icon would disappear when switching away from a group and then back to the group.

======== Version 9.1, Rev. 0: 4 Nov 2003 ========

New icons have been added to the main toolbar for the File Attachment Locator and Message Locator features.

An option has been added to the Configure/General screen to allow you to limit how many connections News Rover will use for a single, multi-part message download. Restricting the number of connections for an individual message will cause News Rover to distribute its connection limit across multiple messages in the download queue.

An option has been added to the Configure/General screen to allow you to limit the maximum connections that News Rover will use for each group (newsgroup or header-only Autoscan interest group).

If you select (highlight) a message entry that is in the download queue, that entry will get the highest priority for downloading. This is a way to force News Rover to give priority to a download queued after other entries.

If you have not selected a message in the download queue, other messages from the currently selected newsgroup (or interest group) will get priority over messages queued for other groups. As you switch between groups, the priority will shift automatically to messages queued for whichever group is currently selected.

If the option was used to put the icon for News Rover in the system tray rather than on the taskbar, News Rover was always restored to a maximized screen state when the icon was clicked. Now it restores its previous state.

If the "Delete All" button was clicked on the Configure/Multipart screen to delete all pending file parts, the database could not be rebuilt until News Rover was stopped and restarted.

Changes made on the Configure/E-mail screen to the time interval to check for new e-mail were not saved.

======== Version 9.0, Rev. 1: 24 Oct 2003 ========

Enhanced the algorithm that matches sections of RAR/PAR archives so that fills and PARs posted by multiple people can be combined.

The blinking download icon shown on message entries was not being stopped properly and could disappear when switching between groups.

If the server download byte limit was used to suspend downloads after a specified number of bytes were downloaded, the downloads were not restarted after the download count was reset.

If you forced News Rover to download a part of an incomplete multipart message, the download would not complete properly.

======== Version 9.0, Rev. 0: 8 Oct 2003 ========

A major change has been made to the way News Rover schedules downloads to improve performance. One field-test customer with a high-speed, fiber-optic Internet connection reported version 9 is able to download up to 20 times faster than earlier versions. That customer is able to make 47 simultaneous connections to news servers using Version 9 and download at a speed of more than 30 Mbps.

Multiple download connections to the news server can now be made for a single multi-part file download.
If multiple download servers are used and they are assigned the same download priority, News Rover will do load-balancing between the servers when doing downloads for header-only Autoscan interest groups or the MP3/File Locator.
If servers have different priorities and the connection limits are smaller on the lower-priority servers, News Rover will make the maximum allowed connections on higher priority servers.

News Rover version 9 supports the new version 2 PAR files (PAR2) to recover missing or damaged sections of RAR file archives. Version 1 PAR files are still supported, of course. To download a RAR file, apply required PAR correction and decompress the RAR file, right click on any section of the RAR file and select "Download and decompress RAR archive" from the popup menu.

News Rover now supports multiple e-mail accounts. To set up the accounts, go to the Configure/E-mail screen. When you compose an e-mail message to be sent, there is a drop-down box where you can select which e-mail account to use. Each account can have different SMTP and POP servers and different e-mail addresses.

Three new options have been addded to the Configure/Advanced screen:

Put News Rover's icon in the system tray (with time of day) rather than on the normal taskbar when News Rover is minimized.
Display a warning box before stopping News Rover.
Automatically start Autoscan when News Rover is launched.

Two new keyboard shortcuts have been added:

You can select a message or a set of messages in the right panel and type 'M' to invoke the "Move-to" function.
You can type 'Q' to post a reply to a newsgroup and quote the entire body of the message that you are currently viewing. Note, you can type 'F' to post a reply without quoting the body.

Some servers (currently only Newsfeeds.com) accept connections through Secure-Tunnel.com which is a site that hides the IP address of the connecting client. There is a new checkbox available on the configuration screen for each news server that you can check to cause News Rover to add "st-" to the address of news servers as it connects to them. Currently, this checkbox is only displayed for news servers at Newsfeeds.com.

The operation of the Control/Clean up lost files has been signifcantly improved to do a better job of recovering "orphaned" newsgroup subscriptions caused by damaged or deleted control files.

In previous versions, it was possible to drag a column header so that the column width was zero and the column was invisible. Now, a small lower limit is imposed on the column width so that columns cannot be "lost".

In some very rare cases, News Rover could crash when decoding subjects with improperly encoded foreign character sets (RFC-2047).

In some cases, yEnc encoded file attachments downloaded by full-body Autoscan interest groups were not being decoded correctly.

The limit on the size of file segments for posted messages has been increased. A split size of 0 or 2000000000 will allow unlimited size.

The warning message displayed about firewall programs when a connection failure occurs has been improved.

The warning messages displayed when unsubscribing from a newsgroup or deleting an Autoscan interest group has been improved.

If the name of a news server was edited, the old name was still displayed in the Rebuild-Databases list. This has been corrected.

======== Version 8.2, Rev. 2: 1 Apr 2003 ========

A button has been added to the RAR download screen to delete all parts of the RAR archive rather than downloading it. This makes it easy to eliminate large RAR files that you don't want.

RAR, PAR and split-file message sections are now displayed even if the display filter minimum size would normally exclude them. This is done so that small ending sections will show up.

If you attempted to edit the name of the display filter suggested after subscribing to a newsgroup, it could cause News Rover to crash.

If you went back to the message header control screen while composing a message, the identity to use for the message returned to the default rather than holding the selected identity.

Sometimes when switching rapidly between JPG pictures, the focus was not left with the picture window.

Pressing Delete while the cursor was in an empty message list could cause News Rover to crash.

The Organization property field of identities was not being saved.

E-mail addresses specified for an Identity are now validated.

======== Version 8.2, Rev. 1: 18 Feb 2003 ========

Improved the News Rover Uninstall procedure to delete the entire News Rover installation directory when News Rover is uninstalled.

A new option has been added to the expiration feature for groups. This option allows you to control whether message expiration will or will not delete messages whose bodies have been downloaded. If you turn the option off, expiration will only delete messages that have not been downloaded (i.e., message headers).

By default, newly created Autoscan interest groups will be set to expire and delete message headers that haven't been downloaded after 30 days.

The deletion of expired entries in the Autoscan pending parts database was not working correctly. Under some conditions, old parts were not being expired and deleted.

If the function was used to delete messages older than a specified number of days and there were no messages old enough to delete, the group got left in a state where its message list did not get updated.

Improved parsing of message subjects with spanish words such as "Dia 1 de 2".

Allow messages with .NFO file attachments to be displayed even if the message size is less than the minimum allowed by the display filter.

Some badly corrupted JPG picture files could cause News Rover to crash when it tried to decode them.

Under some conditions, doing a search through the message list with a search string consisting of a single ampersand ("&") could cause News Rover to crash.

======== Version 8.2, Rev. 0: 6 Jan 2003 ========

Significantly speeded up setting up the message list for large, multipart newsgroups.

If the same newsgroup is scanned by both full-body and header-only Autoscan interest groups, News Rover now downloads only the header when the full body is not needed.

Improved the algorithm that locates file names in message subject lines.

The Notepad program is used to display .nfo and .sfv files. There is an option on the Configure/Advanced screen to turn this off if you prefer to launch some other program.

If an error is detected while decoding a JPG image, News Rover now returns the best image it can produce rather than displaying an error message.

Improved the status displayed when saving all files.

Changed the Save function to warn before overwriting unless the overwrite warning is turned off on the Configure/Advanced screen.

======== Version 8.1, Rev. 2: 13 Dec 2002 ========

If you changed the encrypted/non-encrypted status of a group, any multipart message entries that had not been downloaded were corrupted and could not be downloaded after that.

Prior versions of News Rover converted all newsgroup names to lowercase letters. This version preserves upper-case letters in newsgroup names.

If you uncheck the box labeled "Warn before overwriting file" on the Configure/Advanced screen and save a file that would overwrite a file with the same name, News Rover now generates a unique name by appending "-nn" to the end of the file name.

News Rover's check for available free disk space was not turned off when the free space limits were set to 0 (zero).

======== Version 8.1, Rev. 1: 4 Dec 2002 ========

Optionally, you can now allow information about messages downloaded from subscribed newsgroups to be added to the duplicate message checking databases. To do this, check the appropriate boxes on the duplicate checking configuration screens. Note: this does not block the downloading of messages from subscribed newsgroups, it just prevents Autoscan from downloading the messages after they have been downloaded from subscribed newsgroups.

Improved the process of expiring entries from the duplicate-checking databases so that it does not interfere with downloading messages. Previously, Autoscan could pause while the expiration process ran.

Improved the algorithm that determines which messages are part of a RAR fileset.

If a display filter is selected that allows incomplete multipart message entries to be displayed, the incomplete entries are shown in gray in the message list.

If a single section of a multipart message was available and its sequence number was 0 (zero), the force-download function did not work.

Added an option to the Configure/Advanced screen that allows you to turn off the warning message that is normally displayed when you start to download an incomplete multipart message.

Added a "Move-to" option to the menu of the file attachments list for a group. This renames the selected files to the destination directory.

Changed the default action selection for the warning about files left open to try to reopen the file rather than rebuilding it.

======== Version 8.1, Rev. 0: 19 Nov 2002 ========

Added support for decoding BinHex encoded file attachments. This type of encoding is used for Apple Macintosh files.

There is a new option on the message-panel right-click popup menu -- "Move attachments to..." This uses the Rename function to quickly move file attachments to a specified destination directory. This is much faster than "Save attachments as..." when moving large file attachments. After the attachments are moved, they can no longer be launched from the message entry and they are not deleted when the message entry is deleted (i.e., the file attachments are no longer connected to the message).

You can now tell News Rover to scan entire directories and add all files to the duplicate elimination databases. To do this, go to either the Configure/Duplicate files or Configure/File signatures screens and click the button "Add files".

A new Configure property page has been added for monitoring and controlling the 160-bit SHA1 "file signatures".

Put back the "View" command on the main menu. It had been removed in version 8.0.

The "Copy Interest Group" function did not work if the first (topmost) entry in the interest group list was selected.

Focus was lost from the Picture Gallery and Slide Show viewer when messages were downloaded.

Replies posted by others about a multipart message were sometimes combined with the parts of the message.

Parts of pending multipart messages in the outbox were combined. This caused problems if the outbox message list was viewed before the message was sent.

The next-picture and previous-picture buttons on the Slide Show window were not enabled and disabled dynamically as new pictures were downloaded and added to the Picture Gallery.

The message posting date was not shown for Message Locator searches.

News Rover now truncates the displayed portion of messages to 200,000 characters rather than attempting to display huge messages which can cause problems.

Improved event logging related to expiring old pending file parts.

If an RAR archive with a password was decompressed and "Cancel" was clicked on the screen that asks for a password, the input RAR sections were deleted.

The automatic expiration of pending parts and duplicate message entries was not being done.

Corrected a problem related to downloading a multipart message which has some missing parts.

The lower panel now displays which parts are available if you select a multipart message that has some missing parts.

The popup menu item to manually combine message parts was always disabled.

News Rover did not recognize some legitimate file names in the subject line if they had '@' characters in their names.

When duplicate files were rejected because of the file signature check, the Autoscan statistic for "Has file attachment" was erroneously incremented.

If a multipart message that was pending for download but not yet started was deleted or the download was cancelled, the pending task list was not decremented.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash on startup if an extremely long entry was in the Windows Registry.

======== Version 8.0, Rev. 2: 21 Oct 2002 ========

When a message download completed, the lower message window was cleared even if the message being downloaded was not the one displayed in the lower window.

If a the full-window message view was used and the "Next" or "Next-thread" menu items were clicked, the space used for the next message displayed was not correct.

Occasionally (randomly) the attribution line was not inserted in front of the first block of quoted text.

An extra blank line was inserted between the attribution line and the quoted text that followed it.

======== Version 8.0, Rev. 1: 18 Oct 2002 ========

When decompressing an RAR archive with multiple files in it, News Rover correctly extracted all of the files, but it only listed the first and last files as attachments for the message.

Display filters that selected only messages downloaded during the current session did not work correctly for multipart message entries.

Existing newsgroups and interest groups that were set not to combine multipart message entries did not switch automatically to combining message entries when upgrading to version 8.0.

======== Version 8.0, Rev. 0: 15 Oct 2002 ========

The parts of multipart messages are now combined and stored in the database rather than being recombined each time you enter the group and the message list is loaded. In the case of MP3 newsgroups, this typically reduces the number of messages that need to be loaded, filtered and sorted by about a factor of 7. For multimedia newsgroups, it typically reduces the number of messages being loaded by about a factor of 40. The first time you enter an existing group with messages, the new version will load the full list, combine the parts and update the database. After that, entering the group will be much faster with far fewer messages being loaded.

Major improvements have been made to RAR file processing: (1) Support for the version 3 RAR format (file.part01,rar, file.part02.rar, etc), (2) built-in support for using PAR files to correct missing or damaged RAR files. To download and decompress and RAR file set, right click on any section and select "Download and decompress RAR archive" from the popup menu. For details on using the new RAR decompressor, read the Help section on "RAR files".

You can now create multiple "identities" to use to identify yourself when you post messages or send e-mails. To create an identity, go to the Configure/Identity screen. An identity controls the "From" address shown in your messages, your displayed name and your signature (tag line). When you send a message or a reply, you have the option of selecting which identity to use for the message. You can also associate identities with subscribed newsgroups and Autoscan Interest Groups so that the specified identity will be used by default when posting a message to the group. To set the default identity for a group, right click on the name of the group in the left panel and select Properties from the popup menu. Then select the identity on the General options property page. For additional information, see the Help section on Identities.

You can now customize the "Attribution Line" used to identity the person who posted a message that you are replying to. To do that, modify the properties of your Identities. Each identity can have a different style for the attribution line.

Version 8 has a new type of duplicate file checking for Autoscan using SHA1 160-bit file signatures. The SHA1 signature for a file is calculated as the file is being decoded by News Rover. If the computed signature matches a signature already in the duplicate signature database, the file is considered a duplicate and is deleted. It is believed that no two files in existance have the same SHA1 signatures, so this form of duplicate checking is very exact. You can enable or disable this type of duplicate checking on the Configure/Duplicate-files screen. For additional information, please see the Help section on "Duplicate file configuration".

You can now schedule when downloads of tagged messages for subscribed newsgroups are allowed to run. To do this, go to the Configure/Schedule screen, turn on schedule downloads for subscribed groups and set the hours that you want to allow the downloads to run. For additional information, please read the Help section on "Scheduling message downloads".

Added a new setting for Autoscan Interest Groups and subscribed newsgroups to cause News Rover to keep only messages that do NOT have attached files. This is useful for text newsgroups where spammers may post messages with file attachments.

Autoscan Interest Groups have a new property page where you can specify which news servers are to be used to scan the newsgroups for the interest group. The overall server scanning is still controlled by the Configure/Scanning screen; the interest group server property page just excludes servers that otherwise would attempt to scan newsgroups for the interest group.

Improve message download performance for header-only Autoscan interest groups when there are multiple news servers available for download. News Rover now remembers which server has the parts of a multi-part message available and gives priority to that server when downloading the other parts.

The maximum allowed number of simultaneous connections to a news server has been increased to 20.

If you select text in the body of a message before beginning a reply, the selected text will be pasted in as a quote at the beginning of the reply.

Added a new keyboard command to copy selected text from the lower message window to the upper message window as a quote. Select the text that you want quoted in the lower window and then press the F key.

Some new keyboard commands have been addded:

'n' (lower-case) advances to the next unread message in the current group.
'N' (upper-case) advances to the next unread message in the next group.
'f' or 'F' compose a public, Usenet reply to a message.
'r' or 'R' compose a private, e-mail reply to a message.
'=' (unshifted +) expands the current message thread.
'+' (shift +) expands all message threads.
'-' (unshifted -) collapses the current message thread.
'_' (shifted -) collapses all message threads.
left-arrow is equivalent to '-' (shifted or unshifted)
right-arrow is equivalent to '+' (shifted or unshifted)
F3 finds the next occurrence of an item when doing a search.
'q' or 'Q' when composing a message reply quotes selected text.

You can now set the execution priority for various tasks such as combining the parts of multipart messages and decompressing RAR files. To set the priorities, go to the Configure/Advanced screen.

A new option has been added to the Configure/General screen and also the Slide Show toolbar to set News Rover to reduce the size of big pictures so that they fit on the screen but not to enlarge small pictures.

Set a default display filter of "Messages that may have files" for Autoscan interest groups that only download messages with file names in their subjects.

Force the message list for a header-only Autoscan interest group to be refreshed when Autoscan is manually suspended.

Improved the estimated size of file attachments for yEnc encoded messages.

Fixed News Rover so that it does not try to interpret yEnc header lines embedded in quoted lines.

If you have the Password Protection & Encryption option, you can password protect your address book. To do this, enter your password and get into privileged mode, then click Postoffice on the main menu and select the Address Book entry from the drop-down menu. Then check the box at the bottom of the address book screen. After you do this, the address book will be accessible only when you are running in privileged mode.

Under some circumstances, messages downloaded from a header-only Autoscan interest group could be downloaded from the wrong server.

News Rover did not correctly handle downloaded files whose names contained a question-mark character ("?"). Windows does not allow question marks in file names, so News Rover now removes them.

Removing entries from the Blocked Sender list (on the Configure/Blocked-sender screen) could cause News Rover to crash later when it exited. This problem has been fixed.

When a newsgroup was subscribed on a server and the same newsgroup was already subscribed on another server, News Rover correctly set the same display filter for the new subscription as the old one, but it did not copy over the correct sort order setting for the new group.

News Rover now checks to see if the Registry entries it needs are present. If they aren't, it creates them.

If News Rover crashes due to a corrupted database, the next time it is started it will report which database caused the crash and give you the option to repair the database. Also, a "Startup.log" file is created giving a history of database opens. If News Rover crashes while accessing a database, there is a good chance that the database will be shown as open in the log file.

======== Version 7.5, Rev. 0: 11 Jul 2002 ========

Fixed a problem that allowed News Rover to start more tasks to download messages for header-only Autoscan Interest Groups than should be allowed by the server settings.

Increased the maximum size of a message that may be edited or posted to 200,000 characters.

News Rover could crash if you changed the sort order in the Picture Gallery and there were no pictures in the gallery.

Fixed a problem that caused Autoscan not to scan the last newsgroup that was added to the list of newsgroups available on any news server.

If an Autoscan Interest Group was set to store files in separate directories based on the newsgroup name, pictures added to the gallery while the gallery was open could not be displayed.

If password protection was turned on for a newsgroup at the time that the subscription was made (rather than setting the property later), the newsgroup name continued to show up in the subscription list.

Allow searches (and filters) to match words with accented characters.

Messages whose stated size was larger than about 47,700,000 lines did not have their estimated byte size correctly displayed.

Allow e-mail messages to be sent without specifying a subject, but always require a subject for newsgroup postings.

If a message with an attached file was moved to an encrypted file folder the the file folder already had a file with the same name, both the old and new files were stored incorrectly.

If the file "Move" function was used to move a file to a save directory and the save directory was the same as the directory where the file was originally located, the file was deleted.

Added an option to the Configure/Advanced screen to set how many times News Rover should ask a news server for a message that the server says is unavailable. The default value is 2.

Modified the connection retry mechanism to cause News Rover to make as many connection attempts as specified on the Configure/Advanced screen.

You can now change the size of the fields displayed on the status bar at the bottom of the News Rover screen. To do this, go to the Configure/Advanced screen screen and change the value associated with "Status bar field size percent". A value of 100 (percent) shows the fields the normal size. You can increase the field size up to 100 (percent) or reduce the field sizes down to 80 percent.

An index of the Giganews news server can now be searched using the File Attachment Locator.

File attachments with the type ".jpe" are now recognized as being jpeg pictures, thumbnail images are generated and the picture gallery and slide show features can be used to view them.

On the Configure/Usenet screen you can now specify the maximum number of newsgroups that a message you post will be cross-posted to. If you attempt to cross-post to more newsgroups than the specified limit, the message will be posted multiple times with only the specified number of newsgroups specified in each posting. Limiting the number of newsgroups you cross-post to will slow down the posting but avoid your messages being considered "spam" because they exceed the news server's cross-posting limit.

======== Version 7.4, Rev. 3: 22 Apr 2002 ========

Added a new option to Autoscan Interest Groups. On the Attached Files property page for an Interest Group, you can now enable the new option "Create a sub-directory for each newsgroup". If engaged, News Rover will store downloaded files in subdirectories whose names match the names of the newsgroups from which the message was downloaded.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to fail to decode some yEnc encoded file attachments.

If download failures occurred (such as a line disconnection), and messages were being downloaded for a newsgroup that was not the currently selected one, News Rover did not correctly mark the messages in the queue for later download.

======== Version 7.4, Rev. 2: 11 Apr 2002 ========

Fixed a bug that caused a blank message to be posted whenever a message with a file attachment was posted.

Improved message deletion so that less memory space is used when deleting messages.

Improved the message-sending status screen to allow longer subjects to be displayed and added current and total part counters.

Added a warning message that is displayed if News Rover is unable to connect to a server and ZoneAlarm, BlackICE or Norton Firewall is installed.

Disallow changing the display filter or performing searches while the message list is being set up.

======== Version 7.4, Rev. 1: 5 Apr 2002 ========

Fixed a bug that caused problems when more than one file attachment was posted with a single message. Now if you do this, a separate message is posted with each file and the file name is correctly added to the subject of each message.

Allow message body downloads for header-only Autoscan interest groups to use the maximum number of online connections specified for the server on the Configure/Server screen.

Increased the default maximum number of connections for each group to 4.

Increased the size of the MP3 Music Locator and File Attachment Locator search control screens.

======== Version 7.4, Rev. 0: 3 Apr 2002 ========

Added support for sending messages with yEnc encoded file attachments. In order to use yEnc for file attachments you post, you must select that option on the Configure/Usenet screen. The decoding of yEnc, UUencoded and Base64 encoded file attachments is completely automatic and does not require any settings.

Speeded up scanning of header-only Autoscan interest groups.

The up-arrow and down-arrow keys did not work properly when scrolling the picture gallery if the gallery was scrolled very near the top or bottom.

The status displayed while importing files into a group was not properly cleared when the import finished.

======== Version 7.3, Rev. 2: 5 Mar 2002 ========

Greatly speeded up the deletion of a selected set of messages.

Fixed a bug that prevented manually combining the parts of a message with a yEnc encoded attachment.

Added the ability to set the day of the month when server download statistics are reset. This is on the Statistics/Limits property page for a server. Message header download bytes may also be excluded from the statistics (Giganews does not count header downloads in your usage quota).

Improved the maximum-connection checking logic to prevent extra Autoscan sessions from getting started while online sessions were switching between messages.

Fixed a bug that could cause duplicate "ghost" message entries to appear at the end of a message list.

Added an option to the Configure/Advanced screen to allow you to specify the minimum number of seconds between when the message list for a header-only Autoscan interest group will be updated.

Allow an exclamation point to be part of a file name.

Check server download limits when deciding which server to download from for messages in header-only Autoscan interest groups.

Display a warning message when the All Messages display filter is selected for a binary newsgroup.

======== Version 7.3, Rev. 1: 19 Feb 2002 ========

Fixed a bug that caused multipart yEnc encoded attachments to be improperly decoded by Autoscan. The problem did not affect downloads done by subscribed newsgroups or single-part messages.

Enhanced the feature that checks RAR files to allow the parts of incomplete archives to be downloaded.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if a message had an unusual type of htm attachment.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if it tried to download the list of newly-added newsgroups from two news servers at the same time.

Improved the recognization of file names and part numbers in subject lines when the file name is enclosed in quote marks.

======== Version 7.3, Rev. 0: 13 Feb 2002 ========

Version 7.3 has a significant new feature to make it easier to download RAR file archives. RAR archives are compressed, multi-segment archives posted with extensions .rar, .r00, .r01, etc. They are frequently used to post large multimedia files. RAR archives almost always have multple segments, and all segments must be available in order to successfully decompress the archive. The new feature makes it easy to check whether all of the segments are available and, if they are available, to start downloading them.

To check an RAR archive, right click on a message entry in the right panel that belongs to the archive (i.e., one with a .rxx file attachment). Then select "Combine/Decompress..." from the popup menu followed by "Check RAR files". If any of the segments are missing, it will tell you which ones are missing. If all of the segments are present, it will present a screen with information about the archive; you can then click a button to start downloading all of the segments.

Once all of the segments have been downloaded, you can combine them and decompress the archive by right clicking on a message that is part of the archive and selecting "Combine/Decompress.../Decompress RAR file" from the popup menu.

Added checkboxes to the Duplicate message, Duplicate files and Pending parts configuration screens to suppress the list of items. When there are many items, it can take a long time to set up the list.

Fixed a bug that could cause Autoscan duplicate message checking to incorrectly reject some messages as duplicates.

======== Version 7.2, Rev. 1: 4 Feb 2002 ========

Fixed a problem that could cause News Rover to crash when searching for a sender name in the main message list.

The popup submenu for combining split-file messages and manually combining parts was not correctly enabled for an Autoscan interest group configured to only download message headers.

Fixed a problem that caused the display filter "Messages you posted and replies" to fail under some circumstances.

Changed the way files are created for attachments to make it work better with some virus scanning programs.

Remove spaces and control characters from ends of news server names to avoid IP translation problems.

======== Version 7.2, Rev. 0: 14 Jan 2002 ========

Added support for decoding yEncoded file attachments. YEncoding is a new encoding method that is gaining popularity in some binary newsgroups. This version of News Rover can decode yEncoded attachments. Support for using yEncoding for posting attachments is planned for a future version. For additional information about yEncoding, see http://www.yenc.org

Changed the display filter "Messages that you posted and replies" so that it sets the message list to be sorted by subject and threads messages. This is necessary to make this type of filtering work properly.

If the file name specified for an attachment in an UUencoded section ended with spaces, News Rover did not correctly recognize the file type.

======== Version 7.1, Rev. 1: 26 Dec 2001 ========

Improved the handling and display of error messages generated when problems occurred downloading messages using the MP3 Music Locator or the File Attachment Locator features.

If the slide show screen was maximized, that setting was not remembered the next time it was opened.

Added Help to the Configure/Usenet screen.

Fixed a bug related to which group to initially select if News Rover was shut down with a password protected group selected.

Autoscan could leave a status message of "Entering newsgroup" on the status line while it was sleeping.

======== Version 7.1, Rev. 0: 17 Dec 2001 ========

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash when running under Windows XP or 2000 (the bug did not affect 98 or ME). This bug has been in all earlier versions (7.0, 6.5, 5.4, etc.), so if you plan to use News Rover with Windows XP, it is important to upgrade to this version.

Fixed a bug that prevented the mouse wheel from scrolling the right main message list. This problem only affected some systems.

If the stored description of a news server was extremely long, it could cause News Rover to lose all news server entries.

Added buttons to the MP3 Locator and File Attachment Locator favorites search screens to allow you to reset the "new" messages so that all messages will be fetched on the next search.

Limit the size of windows so that they will fit within the available screen space.

Change the default properties for the display filter "Messages that may have file attachments" to allow any size message to be displayed.

Allow the height of the lower panel of the main screen to get as small as 10 pixels.

======== Version 7.0, Rev. 2: 12 Nov 2001 ========

When you subscribe to a newsgroup and News Rover suggests an initial display filter, it now also suggests a file type filter that controls which messages are stored for the group.

Allow multiple periods to appear between the file name and file type (for example, "picture...jpg").

Recognize part numbers (nn/mm) that appear to the left of the file name in the subject.

News Rover could occasionally crash when using the Message Locator feature if incomplete information for an entry was returned by the search server.

When running under Windows XP, if you tried to start two copies of News Rover, the second copy would display an appropriate error message but would then crash rather than stopping cleanly.

The option on the Configure/General screen to suppress display of newsgroups names did not hide the name in the status line.

======== Version 7.0, Rev. 1: 18 Oct 2001 ========

Sender blocking done from the Picture Gallery did not work.

Changed the function that manually combines parts of multi-part messages to allow a single part to be "combined". This can be used to decode and preview the first part of a multi-part message.

Messages collected by Autoscan were always displayed in the current list as they were received regardless of which Display Filter was selected.

If an Autoscan interest group was created to download only message headers, and a display filter was selected that filtered out incomplete multi-part messages, News Rover could crash when a multi-part message was downloaded.

News Rover could crash with a divide error if it attempted to decode a JPG image whose height or width was 0 (zero) pixels.

Clicking the toolbar icon to check for new newsgroups on a news server caused News Rover to hang.

Improved the algorithm used to find a file name in a subject line so that a name that has a file type consisting of a single character, is no longer recognized as a valid file name.

======== Version 7.0, Rev. 0: 2 Oct 2001 ========

You now can create Autoscan interest groups that scan newsgroups and download only message headers rather than the full message bodies. You then can review the headers and double-click the ones whose bodies you want downloaded. Header-only Autoscan interest groups can scan multiple newsgroups and multiple news servers just as other interest groups. Pieces of multi-part messages found in different newsgroups and on different servers can be combined regardless of their location. When you select a message to be downloaded, News Rover will download it from the newsgroup and news server where it is located.

If you have access to multiple news servers, News Rover Autoscan now can scan multiple servers simultaneously. You can specify how many news servers you wish to scan at the same time, and you can assign priorities to servers to control the scanning order. The new Autoscan control panel shows which news servers are being scanned and gives detailed download information for each server.

News Rover Autoscan now can perform multiple simultaneous downloads from each news server. If you have access to multiple news servers, News Rover can do multiple downloads from each server while simultaneously scanning multiple servers. You can designate the number of simultaneous Autoscan downloads to do for each news server and also the number of simultaneous on-line (subscribed newsgroup) downloads, as well as the total number of simultaneous downloads for each server.

If you have access to multiple news servers, you can configure the MP3 Music Locator and File Attachment Locator so that they will check multiple news servers for files you select to download. You can assign priorities to the news servers to control the order that they are checked. So if you have a local, free news server, you can check it for a file and then, if the file is not available there, advance to subscription news servers that may have more complete file storage.

A sophisticated spelling checker has been added to the screen where you compose outgoing messages. Many options are available to control the operation of the spell checker. If you wish, you can set it to mark misspellings in red as you type.

If your news server has a daily download byte limit, you can set News Rover so that it will suspend its downloads as it approaches the limit. News Rover will then reset its count automatically at the designated hour of the day and resume the pending downloads.

If you collect color JPG pictures and prefer not to have monochrome (black and white) pictures saved, you can turn on the new monochrome picture filter for a group. News Rover then will examine each downloaded JPG picture and discard those that have no color variation.

You now can determine which newsgroups have been recently added to a news server. To do this, select a news server in the left panel and click the toolbar button to subscribe to newsgroups. Then select "New newsgroups" from the list in the lower right corner of the screen. The list of newsgroups added to the news server since the last time you checked will be displayed. Click the "Reset new" button to reset the list.

A new option is available on the Configure/Blocked-senders screen that you can turn on to cause News Rover to reject messages that have invalid e-mail addresses for the sender.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash when manually combining the parts of a multi-part message in the e-mail in-box.

News Rover made an unnecessary connection to the news server when manually combining the parts of a multi-part message and all of the parts had already been downloaded.

Improved the Message Locator feature to handle some search items that it missed previously.

Added a new type of sound that can be enabled on the Configure/Sounds screen. This sound is played when a new complete file is downloaded, decoded and stored to disk.

If multiple entries were selected and deleted, hidden subitems for entries were not always deleted.

Sender blocking and the global exclude filter did not blocking incoming e-mail messages.

Added a button to the message sending screen to select the current newsgroup as the destination for the message.

The Message Locator feature was unable to find more than 100 matching messages.

======== Version 6.5, Rev. 1: 23 Jul 2001 ========

News Rover did not recognize a file name that had only a numeric extension such as myfile.007 Note: it did correctly handle split-file messages with two extensions such as file.mpg.001

Fixed a bug that could cause the "Clean up lost files" function to crash or get hung in a loop.

If automatic dialing was specified, Autoscan runs did not disconnect immediately after they were suspended, but waited for the disconnect-hold time to expire.

======== Version 6.5, Rev. 0: 9 Jul 2001 ========

Fixed a bug that caused News Rover to refresh its message list and lose track of the currently selected message.

Modified the procedure that looks for a file name in a subject to allow a single space to appear between the file name and the period that separates it from the file type.

Improved the way message display filters work for messages that have attached files but do not have a file name in their subjects.

Modified News Rover so that it can handle news server message numbers larger than 2,147,483,647.

Fixed a bug that caused problems for .htm message attachments in encrypted newsgroups.

If a display filter was selected at the time that you subscribed to a newsgroup, the sort order specified for the display filter was not associated with the newsgroup.

Fixed a problem that caused News Rover to fail to recognize multi-part numbers in a subject if they were immediately adjacent to the file name with no intervening spaces such as "file.mpg(1/20)".

Fixed a bug that caused News Rover to crash when manually combining the parts of a multi-part message stored in a filing folder.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash when running on NT systems that did not have dial-up networking installed but had RASAPI32.DLL installed in the system directory.

JPG pictures larger than 2000x2000 pixels could not be displayed in the slide show and produced an error message saying it was an invalid JPG file. Now they are forced to be resized to 2000x2000 if they are larger than that.

Fixed a resource handle "leak" that caused News Rover to fail to release one event handle per newsgroup scanned.

Improved handling of the news server error "480 Authentication required" so that News Rover now advances to the next news server.

Improved the message selection logic to better handle the case where multiple Autoscan Interest Groups scan the same set of newsgroups and they have different types of selection criteria.

======== Version 6.4, Rev. 0: 30 May 2001 ========

Added a new display filter to show only messages you posted and the replies to your messages.

Added a new option to the File Attachments property page for groups to cause News Rover to use the subject of the message as the name for the attached file instead of the actual file name.

Added a checkbox to the message sending screen to add "X-No-Archive: Yes" to the message header to suppress message archiving.

News Rover now makes a backup copy of its primary configuration file so that the information can be recovered if the configuration file gets damaged.

Increased the width of newsgroup display lists to allow for long newsgroup names.

Fixed a bug that caused problems when trying to scroll through a list of newsgroups that had more than 32767 names.

Fixed a bug that caused new message headers to be not displayed if they were part of a thread that was already open.

Made it possible to post a message that has an empty body.

Fixed a bug that caused the References line of a reply to be empty if the reply was posted to a message whose body had not been downloaded.

Enhanced recognition of RAR file types to include .Tnn, .Unn, etc.

======== Version 6.3, Rev. 2: 29 Apr 2001 ========

Updated the Message Locator to match a recent server change that affects the format of messages.

Fixed a problem that could cause decoded multipart files to disappear.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if an interest group had an Exclude filter but no Include filter.

======== Version 6.3, Rev. 0: 24 Apr 2001 ========

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if the properties of a news server were examined or modified while message headers were being downloaded.

Fixed a problem that caused the procedure that combines split-file messages (i.e., file.mpg.001, .002, etc.) to fail if the group was set to store incoming files in an external directory.

Improved the reuse of connections to news servers for subscribed newsgroups so that fewer reconnections are required.

Improved display filtering of file types so that it works if there is an attached file even if a file name was not specified in the message subject.

Cleaned up several things related to checking for available free disk space. It now only checks for Autoscan Interest Groups rather than all groups. It now checks only once every 5 seconds. It doesn't do free disk space checks while Autoscan is suspended.

Improved the separate-window message display so that when Alt-N or Alt-P are pressed to move between messages, the window holds the focus.

Fixed a problem that could cause the Message Locator to fail if a valid newsgroup name could not be found.

Added support for CRAM-MD5 SMTP server logon authentication. The currently supported authentication methods are LOGIN, PLAIN and CRAM-MD5.

======== Version 6.2, Rev. 3: 11 Mar 2001 ========

Added support for a logon name and password for the SMTP e-mail server. The name and password can be set on the Configure/E-mail screen.

Fixed a problem that could cause News Rover to skip a message if an I/O error occurred on an Autoscan run, and it had to resume the scan later.

Changed the default filter setting for Autoscan interest groups to only search message subjects rather than bodies too.

Make News Rover recognize URL's beginning with "https://" as well as "http://".

======== Version 6.2, Rev. 2: 27 Feb 2001 ========

Fixed a bug that caused News Rover to die when trying to decode a JPEG file that used the unusual CMYK color coding system rather than RGB.

Fixed the Message Locator to work with a search server change.

Improved News Rover so that it can automatically compensate when a news server changes the numbering of messages in a newsgroup.

Improved scrolling in the Picture Gallery if there are many pictures.

News Rover did not correctly translate a domain name whose address started with what appeared to be a valid IP address such as 209.66.4.71.news.com

======== Version 6.2, Rev. 1: 15 Feb 2001 ========

Added support for proxy servers (firewalls and gateways) that use the SOCKS protocol. Proxy configuration settings are on the Configure/Server screen.

Fixed a problem that caused the Message Locator to stop working.

News Rover did not correctly decode some multi-part MIME files posted by the "Hogwasher" Macintosh newsreader. The problem has been fixed.

When generating part number designations of the form "(nn/mm)" for multi-part postings, News Rover now makes the number of digits in the current part number match the number of digits in the total part count.

Enhanced News Rover so that it can detect if News Rover was abruptly shut down with some of its message databases in unsafe open states and automatically rebuild them the next time they are opened.

When downloading multi-part files from subscribed newsgroups, News Rover now does a better job of finding the real message parts and ignoring replies that people may have posted with subjects looking like parts.

If an expiration period is set for a group, message headers older than the expiration period are now discarded quickly as they are downloaded before they are written to the database or the body is optionally downloaded.

Changing the font in the lower message panel did not work on some computers. This has been fixed.

Fixed a bug related to scrolling the picture gallery if there were a large number of pictures.

When exiting from News Rover after it established a dial-up connection, a message box is displayed asking if you want to hang up the connection. A bug caused it to always hang up even if you said you wanted to hold the connection. This has been fixed.

If you archived messages in the Outbox, the bodies of the messages were no longer available after being archived.

Enhanced the suggestions provided for display filters when subscribing to newsgroups.

Fixed a resource leak in the picture slide show.

Remember the last file type specified for a stored entry in the File Attachment Locator favorites list and use it as the default for the next entry.

".lqt" has been added as a file type to the Music & Sound filters.

Removed the option to query before deleting message headers that are no longer available on the news server. This option caused problems.

======== Version 6.1, Rev. 0: 9 Jan 2001 ========

News Rover can now do multiple simultaneous downloads of messages from the same newsgroup. You can set the maximum simultaneous download limit on the property page for the group. You can also specify on the Configure/General screen the default group connection limit to be applied to new subscribed groups. Regardless of the number of simultaneous downloads you specify for a newsgroup, the actual number of connections made to the news server will not exceed the limit specified on the property page for the news server.

A "Message Locator" feature has been added to locate text messages in any Usenet newsgroup. Click on the '+' next to "Message Locator" in the left panel and then click "Message search". Type in words you wish to search for, and the Message Locator will find messages in any newsgroup that contain those words. Note, the Message Locator is for finding text messages in non-binary newsgroups. If you are looking for file attachments, use the File Attachment Locator.

News Rover now uses a more sophisticated technique for deciding the order in which to start downloading messages. If you select (highlight) a message entry that is queued to be downloaded, that entry is given the highest priority and will be started before any others. If you are not highlighting a message that is queued for download, then any messages queued for the currently selected newsgroup get priority over messages in other groups. So if you queue a bunch of messages for download and then find one you want right away, select it util News Rover starts downloading it.

You can now add custom header lines to outgoing messages. To do this, click the button labeled "Add header lines" on the screen where you enter the message subject and select the newsgroups.

You can now press the ESC key to exit from the slide show.

Clicking the icons at the left end of message lines did not work correctly if the message display was horizontally scrolled.

Fixed a bug that prevented old messages from being expired and deleted from newsgroups if they had never been read.

If several interest groups had both Include and Exclude Filter expressions, messages might be needlessly downloaded before being rejected.

Improved the Search operation so that when searching through the list of messages if a matching message is found, the keywords being searched for are highlighted in the message display.

Fixed a bug that could cause memory to be lost when downloading multi-part files.

The minimum time interval for the slide show auto-advance has been reduced to 1/10 second.

Improved the warning messages displayed when trying to combine parts of a RAR file or a split-file message and some of the parts are missing or have not been downloaded.

If a file is launched while News Rover is running in Privileged Mode (i.e., a password has been entered), the recent file list for Microsoft Media Player is cleared when News Rover exits or returns to Protected Mode.

Fixed a bug that could cause the message search feature to fail if the group had more than 32,000 messages.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to crash if a virus detector discovered a virus in a file that News Rover was downloading and deleted the file while News Rover was still working on it.

Fixed a bug that could, under some circumstances, cause News Rover to crash when generating HotSync files for a Palm Pilot.

======== Version 6.0, Rev. 2: 25 Oct 2000 ========

Fixed two bugs related to clicking the stop-sign icon when many files were queued to be downloaded: (1) under some conditions, News Rover could lock up when the down-arrow was clicked to restart the downloads; (2) News Rover did not disconnect from the news server, so it would get a server error when attempting to restart the downloads.

If an apparent file name in a message subject has a type of ".htm", ".htm", ".com", ".org" or ".net", it is no longer considered to be a file attachment.

If you right clicked on a newsgroup name and selected the option to reget the list of available messages, it did not delete duplicate entries after regetting the list; now it does.

Added "#" and "+" as characters that can be specified in search filter expressions.

When you change the sort order by clicking on the Subject or Date column headers, message threading is engaged for those sort orders.

Added a function to the file list display for a group to allow the importation of files that had been previously encrypted by News Rover.

The function to delete old messages did not work correctly.

Clicking the Cancel button while saving a file from the file list for a newsgroup did not cancel the operation.

You can now type 'T' to tag or untag the currently selected messages for later download.

======== Version 6.0, Rev. 1: 9 Oct 2000 ========

Fixed a bug that could occasionally cause News Rover to crash if an unexpected disconnection occurred on a dial-up connection.

Fixed a bug that caused News Rover to crash when attempting to decompress a RAR file that is password protected.

The option to view pictures using an external viewer did not work correctly when invoked from within the picture gallery.

Sometimes after setting Password protection for the e-mail outbox, it was not retained for the next run.

When exiting from the slide show, the picture gallery screen is now scrolled so that the last picture viewed in the slide show is visible.

======== Version 6.0, Rev. 0: 25 Sep 2000 ========

A new optional feature is available to allow you to synchronize Usenet newsgroup messages between News Rover and a Palm Pilot handheld personal assistant. You can also upload outgoing replies and e-mail messages from the Palm Pilot into News Rover for posting. For additional information click here.

You can now expand and collapse message threads. Just click the +/- sign in a box at the left end of each subject line. This is very useful when browsing active newsgroups with many messages and follow-up replies.

A new "Slide Show" feature has been added to the Picture Gallery. Now, when you double-click a picture in the gallery to display it full screen, it is displayed in the slide show system. You can move forward and backward between pictures by clicking the arrow icons. You can also start a timed display of pictures.

You can now determine in which newsgroups a message is available after finding it with MP3 Locator or File Attachment Locator. To do this, first do a search then right-click on a file in the search result list and select "Properities" from the popup menu.

News Rover can now decompress RAR file attachments. These messages are posted with file types such as ".rar", ".r00", ".r01", etc. To decode these attachments, first download all of the parts. Then right-click on one of the parts and select "Combine/Decompress..." from the popup menu, then select "Decompress RAR files" from the secondary popup menu. The parts will be combined and decompressed, and a new message entry will be added to your list with the resulting file ready to be launched.

You can now combine split-file messages that have extensions such as ".001", ".002", etc. These messages appear most often in multi-media newsgroups. They have two extensions. For example, a file might be posted as "file.mpg.001", "file.mpg.002", etc. To process these types of files, first download all of the parts. Then right-click on one of the parts and select "Combine/Decompress..." from the popup menu, then select "Combine split-file messages" from the secondary popup menu. A list of the parts will be displayed, click "Combine Parts" to concatenate them into a single file. The resulting file will not have a numbered extension (e.g., "file.mpg"), and it will be in a form that can be launched.

You can now re-download a message from your news server. This is useful if a file attachment got deleted or corrupted, or if the message was marked as unavailable and you want to try getting it again. To re-download a message, select the message(s), then right-click and select "Download selected messages" from the popup menu. Note: this option is only available in subscribed newsgroups (not Autoscan interest groups or MP3 Locator). Also, you cannot re-download a message that was formed by combining multiple parts.

Added ROT-13 decoding support. ROT-13 is a method for weakly encrypting portions of messages. It is most commonly used to obscure the bodies of messages that may have offensive text. For example, some insensitive jokes found in rec.humor are encrypted using ROT-13. If you encounter a message whose body is encrypted using ROT-13, the encrypted portion will appear as gibberish, but you will be able to see normal punctuation characters and spaces between words. To decrypt the ROT-13 section, select (highlight) the encrypted text, then right click and select "ROT-13 translation" from the popup menu.

The mouse wheel can now be used to scroll through the message list and the picture gallery.

Enhanced the warning displayed when running a executable program attached to a message so that it is displayed when running a .vbs (Visual Basic) script as well as a .exe, .com or .scf (executable program) file.

Enhanced the display filter conditions so that there are two new conditions that can be used to select messages: (1) Messages that have been tagged or queued for download; (2) File attachments that have or have not been launched.

Added additional display information to the lower panel for a message that is either being downloaded or is queued for download.

Added a new Delete option for newsgroups to delete message entries that do not have file names in their subjects.

Enhanced the retry system so that if an I/O error occurs during an Autoscan run and News Rover is unable to reconnect to the news server, it skips that server and advances to any other servers that are waiting to be scanned.

Changed the Outbox to use a more robust type of database and allowed encryption of outbox messages.

You can now specify how long News Rover should hold open a connection to a news server while it is idle. This value is specified on the news server configuration screen. You can specify a different value for each server.

Improvements were made to the code that finds file names in subject lines to make it correctly recogize file names of the form "file [1of2].r01"

Typing 'B' while the message list is selected now advances to the next unread message that has a body.

When getting a limited number of message headers for a newsgroup (such as when entering an empty one or regetting headers), you can now specify if you want to get recent or old headers.

The number of pending (unsent) messages in the Outbox is now shown in the left panel list.

Fixed two bugs related to decoding binary attachments posted as multi-part messages: (1) if the UU-encoded section began with "begin 755" rather than the standard "begin 644", two extra bytes were added to the front of the file; (2) if the attachment ended with a short UU-encoded line, there were some cases where the last few bytes might be dropped.

Fixed a bug that caused the body of a message that just completed a download to be shown in the lower message window even if you were browsing a different message.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to die if a message had an attached file with an extremely long name.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to die if the subject was very long and contained rfc2047 encodings.

Fixed a bug that caused News Rover not to encrypt existing files for a newsgroup or interest group when the encryption checkbox was checked.

Fixed a bug that prevented the full-screen message display from scrolling properly when the cursor was moved off the page limits.

Fixed a bug that caused the Stop-sign icon from stopping file download requests that were queued for the File Attachment Locator.

News Rover did not properly account for daylight savings time when converting dates and times in message headers, so the displayed time for a message might be off by an hour.

If an I/O error occurred while the list of available messages was being downloaded for a subscribed newsgroup, when News Rover reconnected and retried the download, it would refetch message entries successfully gotten by the first download.

When importing a comma-delimited file into the address book, News Rover did not properly handle fields that were enclosed by quote marks.

When News Rover got the initial list of available newsgroups from the news server, it did not record the date and time, so it got the list again when the first Autoscan run was done. Also, when checking for new newsgroups, it did not correctly convert the time to GMT.

======== Version 5.4, Rev. 3: 3 May 2000 ========

If the encryption option was set at the time that a newsgroup subscription was made (i.e., in the newsgroup selection list), file attachments were encrypted but the message text was not encrypted until the properties page for the newsgroup was viewed.

If you used the "Delete all" operation to delete all messages from a newsgroup, message text files with the .msg extension were not deleted for the newsgroup.

Added additional verification of record structures. This should allow News Rover to automatically detect corrupted records and avoid them.

When all messages were deleted from a group, some of the toolbar buttons were not disabled that should have been disabled.

If a download was cancelled in the MP3 Locator or File Attachment Locator group, the Download-all-parts button was not enabled.

The currently selected message was sometimes not remembered if you changed the sort order.

If you click a column header more than once without clicking on any other column headers, the effect is to reverse the sort order on that column.

A string of trash characters could be displayed with some server error messages.

Changed the new version notification so that the notification is displayed the next time News Rover is started rather than interrupting its running.

======== Version 5.4, Rev. 2: 6 Apr 2000 ========

Added a function to allow you to manually combine parts of a multi-part message. This is useful if the parts have different subjects. To do a manual combine, select a display filter such as "All messages" that does not hide incomplete multi-part files, then select the parts of the message (hold down Control while clicking), then right-click and select "Manaully combine parts" from the popup menu.

Fixed a bug that could cause News Rover to lose its list of interest groups if you attempted to start News Rover while another copy was already running.

Improved the selection of the list insertion point for messages inserted after combing multiple parts.

Increased the number of files that can be added to duplicate databases in a single selection operation.

You can now select multiple entries in the address book as message recipients without having to close and reenter the address book.

If you used the full-screen