(...) I haven't seen that, but I wonder if what Emacs means by "nov line" is "news overview line"? (That would make sense too, if it croaks while fetching new articles.) Does it tell you which group it's downloading while it's doing that? If I knew (...) (25 years ago, 16-Feb-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
(...) Yep, "nov line" is definitively news overview line". (...) It normally happens while downloading the unread messages in some large group. I've tried to manually telnet to the NNTP server to retrieve the nov lines, but I found nothing (...) (25 years ago, 17-Feb-00, to lugnet.admin.general)