Locked Out by Yahoo

[Manfred]

I've had no problems with lockouts for a long time, having PGO set to go at startup. Today I subscribed to a new group (megacycle) added it to PGO and manually initiated a download for just that group.

Got to message 467 and was "locked out by yahoo". Options under download and workflow are all off. Should some setting be changed to prevent this?

Manfred

[Wilson Logan]

Hi Manfred,

Clearly you should have message caching on.  Apart from that everything should be working as usual.

I shall do a big download as a test & get back to you.

Cheers,

Wilson.

[Manfred]

OK, I enabled the caching option and manually started a DL. The group is "MegaSquirt", I set the range to "1 to last" .

Got locked out.

[Manfred]

Here's some more info. I was eventually able to get back into yahoo, I guess the lock-out expired.

The message count for that group was at 920. all of them non-existant.

So even with caching on, attempting to retreive non-existant messages results in a lock-out . Or so it would appear.

I suspect there is a difference in the code that deals with existing messages and caches, burst DLs them or wharever, and the code that deals with a message that can't be found.

Too many requests and yahoo chokes you off.

Manfred

[Wilson Logan]

Hi Manfred,

If you look through the sticky post on Yahoo Lockout you'll see the explanation but here it is:

You only get so many 'hits' on the Yahoo database before you get kicked. In caching mode getting 100 messages still only counts as one hit therefore you could have had 92,000 messages before being locked out.

However, if your request to the database for 100 messages results in a failure (e.g. because the first message doesn't exist) that counts as one hit. If many messages are missing you'll soon run into your hit limit.

You can configure PGO to stop your automatic download after a certain number of failures in File--> Options--> Workflow, 'Stop after receiving' field (I set mine to 10). This allows you the chance to look at the messages in Yahoo & determine the next existing record number. Then right click on the group name & choose Group Settings. Choose the Download tab & set the First message to start at field.

Cheers,

Wilson.

[Manfred]

Thanks for the explaination and work-around.

Manfred