Post by Geoff FieldI tried exactly that several times, but Thunderbird *keeps* asking
me if I want to subscribe and _continues_ re-displaying ALL
messages as unread.
Not sure if this is what you want (it's a while since I migrated) but
try Right-click on group, Properties, Offline tab, Select this newsgroup
for offline use, Download now. This might solve your problem, or it
might be something completely different/that you have already done.
And I sort of miss the same "synch all" functionality[1] as OE had.
There's an icon in the extreme left of the lower status bar that
(currently, for me) says "You are offline. Click to go online." which,
when pressed will send any messages waiting in the Outbox,
appropriately[2]. Then when online, click again to go back offline and
it gives you an option[2] to download everything. Which you can read
'offline', regardless of your net status.
That's the way I do it (which explains why sometimes my messages
sometimes come through even more asynchronously, compared to the
time-stamp, than you would expect from general propagation times),
though Ctrl-Shift-T is apparently one (not-going-offline) alternative to
getting all messages refreshed.
I like Thunderbird, but you may /have/ to get used to some niggles, only
some of which have ended up in (long, I'm so sorry) footnotes to this
post. This is one reason why it took around 12 months from when I first
experimented with Thunderbird to give it a serious go, and even then I
was mainly reading in parallel with OE to get used to the various ways
it differs.
[1] For which I've never quite found the same kind of thing via inbuilt
options or plugins, plus it has other annoying habits[3][4][5][6] that I
can't seem to resolve, but that I get around.
[2] Unless you have configured it to always/never do so, in the options,
and not to ask.
[3] A downloaded message, perfectly readable, /cannot/ be opened as
"View | Message Source (Ctrl-U)" while offline, because it ignores any
local copy (that normal reading will use) and tries to look at the
server. (This proven by disconnecting the whole computer, while
Thunderbird thinks it is still online and getting a "cannot connect"
message instead of a 'blank' source.)
[4] If, while still in the middle of 'synching' a group, in the midst of
"going off-line", you click on that group, it stops downloading messages
from that, and leaves you with "This message is not available" on any
remaining ones. To resolve, you need to re-open (or re-preview) the
message whilst Thunderbird is (knowingly) online again, it downloads
permanently and all is sorted.
[5] The absolutely most annoying habit is that it treats the ABP
download completely different from the AFP one. Despite being exactly
the same in all settings I have checked (including "Don't delete any
messages" in the Retention Policy for the group, it /still/ manages to
perma-delete, and disavow all knowledge of, any message that has been
marked read and then disappears from the online tree (change to new
group and back, or even collapse the thread that it is buried within and
then expand once more).
[6] The editor has a funny little quirk. You expect that when you
cursor beyond the end of the visible part of the pane that it scrolls
the extra line(s) it needs to. But sometimes there are 'points' in the
document[7] where a sudden scroll can occur (quite disconcertingly)
without any need to.
[7] In this one, somewhere in the "not-going-offline" mentioned in the
penultimate non-footnote paragraph, also "plugins" in the first
footnote. The former seemed to (generally) want to scroll when there
are less than six lines above it when you cursor (forwards) through it,
while it is near the top, the latter created a lot more space below when
scrolling up through it (and it was near the bottom). Though it's hard
to duplicate. Lengthening this message seems to have removed this
behaviour, though while the "n-g-o" quote within this very footnote was
the very bottom line, scrolling through it 'juddered' the editing
canvas, as if it was trying to scroll down (giving it a few more lines
visible beneath it) but then reverted because there /were/ no more
lines. Now it isn't so strictly at the very bottom, having written
this extra text, but if there are less than seven full lines below it,
and you cursor across it (from the '"' to the space, cursoring right, or
from the 'o' to the '-' cursoring left) it will jump to give you those
seven lines. Only now it has stopped again. It has not escaped my
notice that "plugins" and "offline" are words that the spill-chucker
underlines, and thus I suspect some kind of causal link between the
editing and spill-chucking sub-subsystems. Although the phenomenon
comes and goes, repeatable at times, then vanishing for no immediately
obvious reason, so it's hard to pin down whether it would/could happen
to /every/ unrecognised word, and I haven't ruled out whether it could
happen to words that are not highlit.