Yahoo d/l limit

[Pres]

I have 20GB a month. Thats good for about 2.6 million messages.

Cool!

Also, this feature is just for catching the latest messages, not for DL'ing whole groups, thats what the zipped archives are for.

Hey, there ya go... Never noticed that you could upload archives before...duh. ::) I'll look into getting clearance to upload from my group mom.

[Wilson Logan]

Pres,

When you're going to upload, please make sure the archive files are zipped up before you FTP them.

Cheers,

Wilson.

[Brad]

Tonight, no d/l limit seem to be in effect.  I haven't downloaded in some time, but tonight I decided to download a 91,000 message group.  I'm on a broadband connection in a motel and it just keeps banging away at about 90 to 110/minute.  I know I've already got at least 2K, so I've turned off limiting and getting as many as possible.

Brad

[Brad]

Over 32,000 messages in about 4 hours and still running!

Brad

[Wilson Logan]

Brad,

Thats great news.

Make hay while the sun shines !

Cheers,

Wilson.

[ginahoy]

With one-way satellite, I can usually d/l a large file or image at 1.4 Mbps. However, since pgo must send a request for each message, it can only retrieve about 32 messages per minute. This is due to satellite latency as well as the limiations of using a landline for uplink.

But even still, I've been downloading a large group for the past couple of hours and haven't hit a snag yet. Thanks for the alert!

I wonder if the driver is asleep at the wheel or he's just trying to see how hard it will rain!

David

[Pres]

I'm seeing the same thing here - I've got 10k messages so far from a group I'd been putting off downloading because it had 23k messages and I figured that'd take forever.

But not today! (:

FWIW my rate with cable (in Japan) is also in the 30-33 messages/minute range.

Pres

[ginahoy]

Well, it appears that the party is over. I just hit limit at after 345 messages. Oh, well. It was great while it lasted. I should have left my system on all night last couple of nights!
David

[Pres]

Yeah, I woke up this morning and found that my download had peaked out at 13,000 of 23,000 messages.

They're probably looking at their logs right now and saying, "Man, we better not do that again!"  ;)

[gcnmarcus]

Hello,

I just found out about this site.  I normally use YahooPOPS but I will check this out and see how it works.

I just got a 999 error which may be a result of some limit.  So far I have seen people talk about number of messages sent as well as time spent as variables Yahoo might use to determine when an account should be locked up with a 999.

May I also suggest it might keep track of what intervals an account is accessed.  For example, if you make it wait 1 hour before downloading more messages, Yahoo might have a limit as to how many times it gets mail every hour.  If it retrieves mail in this fashion, then 24 times with an hour apart could possibly be a factor to block an account.

I say this cause I don't come close to 20-30 emails a day.  I also regularly delete messages.  I don't spend much time, but I do have email programs check on a regular basis.  If people chose an hour interval, perhaps there could be something added like randomly pick 1-10 minutes to jog the times it checks email so it isn't always an exact hour.  Then Yahoo would have a harder time to determine if it is automatic.  There is also the possibility they have a range set up.

[Pres]

Just to keep things up to date, I ran into the "Error 999" DL limit after only 168 messages of a new group today. But that was after poking about on the Groups web pages earlier on, so that might have used up some of my brownie points for the day. :) It looks like they're still tweaking their settings.

I'll try setting my limit lower and see what happens.

[ginahoy]

I'm not sure, but it seems to me that other things could cause the 999 error. I got it today on my first attempt to access my groups. And this has happened to me twice in the last couple of months.

Since my ISP assigns IP addresses dynamically, it's possible (but highly unlikely) that another PGO user had been assigned the same IP address earlier in the day and had already tripped the limit. But I have Direcway Satellite modem, and there aren't very many of those out there

So I can't help but to wonder if Yahoo may be using this same response when they have server problems, etc.

David

[ginahoy]

I just got a 999 error which may be a result of some limit.  So far I have seen people talk about number of messages sent as well as time spent as variables Yahoo might use to determine when an account should be locked up with a 999.

gcnmarcus,
There's been a lot of discussion on this issue (much of it in this thread). My personal experience suggests that the limits are based on a combination of the number of message reads and the number of bytes transferred within some time frame. And to be sure, Yahoo has tweaked the limits since they were first initiated earlier this year.

If you aren't already aware of it, there's a menu where you can customize your download speed and profile (file/options/download). But there's no facility for randomizing the wait time. Your suggestion that Yahoo servers are somehow setting limits based on the current activity profile of each individual user seems a bit far fetched.  

Most people report success with rates of 150 to 400 messages per session. This is useful for archiving an entire group. Your comments suggest that you might have been blocked after downloading just a handful of messages. Please elaborate.

David

[Wilson Logan]

Hi David,

>I'm not sure, but it seems to me that other things could cause the 999 error. I got it today on my first attempt to access my groups.

Yahoo bring down their system on a near daily basis for 1 to 2 hours to do some sort of maintenance. In my experience it seems to be happening around 08 - 09 GMT ( 00 - 01 PST ?).  This will lead to a 999 error without downloading any messages.

Cheers,

Wilson.

[ginahoy]

wonder how long the yahoo lock lasts...still about a day like before?

In my experience, the lock lasts a couple of hours, always less than three.

also interesting...when I would be shut out on previous versions, I could not access yahoo at all.  Nowadays, I can access yahoo manually through my browser, even though PGO reports a yahoo lock.

I don't see how the version changes could have anything to do with that. Lockout is based on your IP address. If you could access your groups via browser, you weren't locked out (that is, unless your browser is AOL, in which case the browser is assigned a different IP address from your primary connection).

FWIW, I've had a few sessions in recent days where pgo reported a time-out or another error message (I can't remember specifics), but I wasn't locked out. In the case of the time-out, it was an issue with my Internet connection. I know there's been a lot of changes to the program in recent weeks, but I have no reason to think the errors I got had anything to do with pgo.
DavidB