Why do the latest versions retrieve headers more slowly?
One of Agent’s purging options is “When the article is no longer available on the server”. In previous versions (prior to Free Agent 1.0 / Agent .99), it would do this by checking the range of available articles reported by the server and purging all articles whose numbers were before the available range. For example, if the server reported that articles 204-566 were available, Agent would purge all articles with numbers 203 or less. But our beta testing showed that in many circumstances there would be gaps in the reported range of articles. This would typically happen when one article was posted in a way that would cause it to remain on the server much longer than normal. This could happen if an article was posted with an explicit expiration date, or if an article was cross-posted. (In many cases, cross-posted articles are not deleted from any groups until they are deleted from all groups.) These gaps would cause Agent to think that articles were still available when they really weren
