Anyone having a problem with "Message could not be displayed" in Outlook Express

[yDecode]

UPDATE - read the post below this one.

I received info from one user that on selected newsgroups on some very specific posts sometimes happens that the newsreader (i.e. Outlook Express) reports "message could not be displayed" error. Now, this doesn't necessarly mean it is yDecode bug, but if it is, we'd like to investigate it further just to make sure it isn't something about the server or Outlook Express. This seems to hapen very rarely and only on some newsgroups.

If you can see this or it happens to you, please let us know, contact us with the details, i.e. group name, post name etc. - and we'll try to examine if we can reproduce it ourselves. We tested yDecode on very large number of posts and we haven't found this issue yet, but it is possible that we missed something. As v1.41 is already very stable release (this is the only real bug report we got so far since its release), we'd like to remove this issue (if it is yDecode issue that is) and make it even better.

[yDecode]

UPDATE: - After examining the issue it turns out that this is not yDecode issue after all but Outlook Express issue. It is possible that the following things can affect the newsreading experience:

a) Having too many headers in OE where it becomes sluggish or works less good than usual
b) Having too little storage space (disk space) - usually on C: disk (boot disk)

To have these issues resolved - you can clean up OE cache on groups with a lot of articles more often manually - or you can set OE options to clean up messages automatically in its options. Also you need to make sure that you have enough disk space on the disk that stores cache which is usually C: disk.

To setup OE auto-maintenance: go to options in Outlook Express and select "Maintenance" tab. When there - take a look at option "Delete news messages ___ days after being downloaded". Reduce this number to 3 or 2 days. For binaries groups, this is still a lot of messages being stored. If you read more text groups, you can increase this setting to store the messages for more days. It all depends on your news reading habits so you'll have to find a figure that suits you the best.

To setup OE to download specific number of headers: Go to options again and select "Read" tab. Search for Get ___ headers at time option. Uncheck this option to download all headers. Set it to 100,000 for example to limit OE to downloading to 100,000 headers. Note that by changing this option you may affect yDecode multipart recognition abilities (it needs as much headers as possible to recognize multiparts). yDecode itself can work with large number of headers without significant slowdowns.

This problem is related to another post describing 2GB folder size limit of Outlook Express.

If you are not having issues with the above problem you can safely ignore this notification as there seems to be no direct bugs in yDecode.

Note that similar issues could be a problem with other newsreaders as well.