There is another possible reason for this that nothing can fix: some
messages are so large that they are broken into smaller peices in individual
posts. These need to be recombined by your newsreader in order for the whole
binary to be accessable. If you click on a post other than the first part of
the binary, the "attachment" will not have the file header information and
will not be understood - and so will be displayed as text, without an
attachment at all.
Allied to this is the phenomenon of "churn". Messages on a newsgroup server
have only a limited lifespan, depending on the group and the server's
settings. The more parts a message is divided into, the more likely it is
that part of it will be missing. In theory, since the first part is the
oldest, it will be the first to go. Depending on the server settings for how
much disk space to reserve for that newsgroup, and how much activity there
is at any given time, binary attachments might persist for weeks, days,
hours, or even minutes.
So its possible that you might not need anything to work with binaries -
except to ignore ones that aren't complete.
Mike Bourke
