CarboHolic wrote:

[ ... ]
Sounds like my ISP should do the housecleaning.

Not necessary. Are you sure you are not talking about the messages
cached by your newsreader? For example, when on my newsreader the
cache gets to about 20'000 messages I remove the expired messages and
this leaves only around 10'000.

No, I use message rules with outlook. It always says 48000 not dowloaded
so it is my ISP server.

Isn't there some option to mark old messages? I'm using Netscape and
I can say "Download 1000 headers, mark the rest as read" - I do this
when I subscribe to new newsgroups; doing this just once makes sure
I never see any indication that there are more old cached messages.

- Alex