A way to get around the download limit?

[Wilson Logan]

I wonder if using a proxy server service like this:

http://www.anonymizer.com/index.shtml

would work?

Cheers,

Wilson.

[scubaman]

Has anyone tried that?  Does that sort of thing really hide an ip address?

Rich

[Wilson Logan]

I tried it out of curiosity. You can get a trial account with anonymizer.com.

It didn't work. Should have done though.

Wilson.

[phazei]

I'm positive the limit is based on IP address alone.

AOL caches lots of stuff and doesn't quite give direct internet access so that's why AOL7 would work.

I have a cable modem with a dynamic IP, there is a way to continually change the ip addy whenever I want (not quite legal) though it has helped me download the groups.  There is a yamaha_zuma group I want to download all of so I can search it quickly and easily but it has 24000+ messages.  I'm up to 10000 getting about 150-200 posts at a time before it will hit the limit and kick me off.  If I go back to a ip address I used before it works after 24hrs.  It might work sooner but I don't get back to it before then.

Question:
Are groups from uk.groups.yahoo.com different from groups.yahoo.com?  It could be based on site.  Though I just tried to go to the uk.g.y.com for the first time and it seems I'm kicked from there also.  I'll try to find a group from there as soon as I change my ip and see how much it let me d/l.

[phazei]

Well, I've tried a uk group, and get the same thing, can download 150-200 msgs then it dies.  I'd be pretty certain that it must be a byte limit since I get a different number of msg's each time and it averages out.  Perhaps if a history function was added that kept a record of how many messages were downloaded each session and the avg size of each, would be really usefull... like something that would analize the log file.  As the log file is now it gets to be 10+ megs after a day of leaving it alone because there are 14000 lines saying
3/27/2004 12:00:01 AM >  Receive message : 23754
3/27/2004 12:00:01 AM >  Error : Invalid page!

[phazei]

Oh, and if people in the UK can download so many more messages then yahoo would have to be using ip to detect location since it's not based on if you're at the .uk site.  So a proxy in the UK would allow people in the us to download lots of messages.

[DaveMucha]

It would seem that if one created say, 10 Yahoo accounts, then one could run till one of those drops out, and then just sign in as another account.

Being on a cable modem, when I shut the modem off and wait a few minutes and then turn it back on, I get a different IP address, at least that is what the installer told me.

For dial-up, I could dial into any one of about 6 local phone call numbers to get on line.  I would assume that each had a seperate IP address ?

So... if there is some magic combination of cookies, IP address and account monitoring, maybe there is some way to alter each in turn to get past the ceiling ?



Just an idea.

Dave

[Wilson Logan]

Dave,

The block is IP based. You can run the same ID so long as you change IP's every so often. Dialup would do it but its so slow you could be occasionally locked out on a Cable connection & still get more messages with the Cable.

A Cable connection that you can switch on & off to get a new IP would work. 9 times out of 10 I get the same IP number. Its almost static but just not static enough to say, run  a server. Gee, I wonder why that is. Not.

The best thing would be a proxy with a big list of proxys to randomly connect through. You'd need to set that up yourself as PGO does not directly support that option.

Having said all that, when do you really need to get more than 100,000 messages in one session? Not that often.

Cheers,

Wilson.

[WmHBlair]

I just discovered this wonderful program earlier this morning, downloaded it, installed it, and used it to download the entire 17,022 message archive of a particular Group to which I belong. I had no clue (nor warning) that there might be some limit imposed by Yahoo! Groups on how many messages I could download in one day (or at one time), so I just assumed I could do all of them.

After discovering a limitation elsewhere in the program, I managed to find my way here to see what might be of interest. Finding the "Wish List" section, I happily discovered that someone else has already covered the issue. But, while I was here, I discovered this interesting thread (and others), which indicate that there is, or at least has been, such a limitation in place, and people have been tearing their hair out trying to find workarounds.

To test this, I added another group and downloaded another 1486 messages. I sampled the messages throughout that group and confirmed that they were (probably) all successfully downloaded. Checking that first group, the first messages, the last several dozen, and every other message I checked (maybe an hundred) were also successfully downloaded.

Now, I am behind a hardware firewall with a fixed IP address. If there is, in fact, some IP address limitation, then either it is not working today, or else there is some other consideration applied by Yahoo in determining when to impose this limitation.

Meanwhile, PG Offline is happily downloading a huge message archive for me. Color me very ;D also!

[Wilson Logan]

Hi William,

There's a very complete (ie long thread) covering this topic here:

http://pgoffline.com/forum/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=17

Its probably best to read just the last couple of pages unless you're interested in the history of PGO.

The short answer however is that PGO now uses a caching download which downloads 100 messages per 'hit' on the Yahoo servers. The 'hit' limit is 200 - 300. So you can usually reliably get 20,000 - 30,000 messages per session (24hrs). I have had well over 100,000 messages in one session though so the limit is probably load biased.

Cheers,

Wilson.