Problem: I sometimes get gaps between the message numbers in the bulletins list. I am using the FBB unproto beacons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Answer: There will always be some message numbers missing, because WinPack will not include other people's personal mail in your list. However, if you find that a whole block of numbers is missing, and this correlates with having had your system turned off for some time, then it is because of the following:- When you send an unproto sync request to an FBB BBS, the BBS will only roll back the unproto beacons up to a set number of messages. How many it will roll back is set by the sysop and varies widely. My local BBS will roll back up to a few hundred, but other BBSs may have the limit set as low as ten. If your sync request asks the BBS to roll back by more than its limit, then it sends a special unproto message to your system telling it to update your message pointer, this results in a gap occurring in your bulletins list. The following example may help:- You have had your WinPack system switched off. The last message number you received before you switched it off was 10,000. Whilst your system has been off, the BBS has seen another 1,000 messages, so its latest message number is 11,000. The sysop has set up the BBS so that the unproto beacons will only roll back by a maximum of 100 messages. You switch on your system and it sends a sync request based on message number 10,000. The BBS sees that this would mean rolling back by 1,000 messages, but its limit is only 100, so it sends an instruction to your system to update your message pointer to 10,901. The BBS then sends the unproto beacons for message numbers 10,901 to 11,000. (This is actually a slight simplification, because if you have any personal mail between message numbers 10,000 and 10,901, the message numbers will be skipped only up to your first personal message, that number is then beaconed, and another block of numbers is then skipped, etc.) Roger Barker, G4IDE December 1997