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Also known as: missing article, article missing
The general condition behind both 430 and 423 responses: the article requested is not in that server's spool. Age past the retention window is the most frequent reason, followed by incomplete propagation and removal from the spool. Because spools differ between backbones, an article absent from one provider is often present on another, which is why multi-server setups raise completion on older releases.
The response is narrower in scope than it is usually read to be. It states that one server, at one instant, cannot produce the article named in one request. It carries no claim about that article's presence on any other server, no explanation for the absence, and no indication of whether the article was ever held. Servers answer identically for expiry, removal and never-received, and there is no extended status separating them.
430 answers a request made by message-id, the globally unique identifier assigned at posting time. 423 answers a request made by article number, which is a per-server sequence value meaning nothing on any other machine. The practical consequence is that 423 frequently signals a stale local index rather than a missing article: numbers cached from an earlier session no longer line up with the server's current numbering. NZB-driven downloads request by message-id and therefore meet 430 almost exclusively, while header-index readers see both.
The STAT command asks whether an article exists and returns its number and message-id with no body transferred. It is the cheap way to establish presence, and it is what a client uses internally before committing connections to a large fetch. Running the same probes against two accounts on different backbones settles whether an article is absent everywhere or only from one spool, at negligible cost in bandwidth. The same probe is what a connection test performs when it reports an account healthy while downloads still fail, which is a useful result rather than a contradiction: it demonstrates that the session, the credentials and the group are all fine and that the absence is specific to the articles requested.
Fault normally rests with the server queried or with propagation between backbones. Two local situations produce the same error with nothing missing server-side. A stale header index requests articles by numbers that have since been reassigned or expired past the client's cached view. An old NZB references message-ids that were valid when the file was generated and are not now, which is an indexer-age problem rather than a provider one; the article-age figure most indexers display is the relevant number. Neither is improved by changing connection counts or retry settings.
A sudden run of not-found answers on every request, including for articles known to be present, is usually authentication or entitlement rather than absence. A 480 means the session is not authenticated and the client has not supplied credentials for that connection. A 411 means the group named does not exist on that server, which is a different failure from an article inside a carried group being unavailable. An account past its transfer allowance can fail in a way resembling universal not-found. The giveaway in every one of these is that a recent, known-good article fails too, whereas genuine absence is selective and follows the age or the specific release rather than the account.
Browse all terms in Errors & Troubleshooting, or see the full Usenet glossary.