Subject: Re: What is /hdr/ subdirectory?

From: John Goerzen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:50:37 -0500

Hi Hadmut,

Sergey has some information about it here:

https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Spool.html#HdrFile

You can also use a nohdr option in the config file or on the command
line to suppress this.

They can be safely removed also.

- John

On Wed, Mar 11 2026, Hadmut Danisch wrote:

> Hi, 
>
> technical question because I'm hunting a bug:
>
> In /var/spool/nncp/*/tx  there is a subdirectory  /hdr/ . 
>
> There is always a pair of files,  eg. 
>
> tx/7SM43TMJGSV3RGBZT4RPYK4XJN3HSMBGWPLEIBI2IMZPABREB4BQ
> tx/hdr/7SM43TMJGSV3RGBZT4RPYK4XJN3HSMBGWPLEIBI2IMZPABREB4BQ
>
> and I'm hunting the problem, why they do have different ownerships, the hdr file is
> owned by root and silently skipped by the daemon. 
>
> For some reason, the hdr file is generated significantly later (here: 10min). 
>
> So my question is: What is the /hdr/ file? On what occasion is it generated?
>
> regards
>
> Hadmut