Password Required

Encryption here sits at the archive layer, well above anything the news server does. The RAR or 7z volumes traveled as ordinary yEnc-encoded articles, byte for byte the same as any other binary post, and no part of the transport knows or cares that their contents are encrypted. The obstruction is entirely local, arising the moment the extraction tool opens the first volume and finds encrypted file data or an encrypted header.

Why a healthy download reports as failed

Clients summarize a job by its final outcome rather than by stage. An entry showing every article transferred, a passing .par2 verification, and then a failure line is describing a complete download followed by a blocked unpack. The log line immediately above the failure carries the real information, and extraction tools state the encrypted-archive condition explicitly instead of reporting corruption. Reading it saves the hours otherwise spent raising the connection count, adding a second provider, or re-running par repair, none of which touch this. Retention and completion rate are equally irrelevant: the articles are already on disk.

Where clients look for a passphrase

Three conventions are in use, and they are conventions rather than parts of any specification. An NZB can carry the passphrase in a metadata element in its head block, written with a type attribute of password, which most current clients read automatically on import. The release name itself sometimes carries the passphrase after a separator, and many clients will try text drawn from the job name. Finally, clients maintain a password list or file whose entries are tried in order against each encrypted archive. If none of the three yields a match, the job stops.

Two forms of RAR encryption, two symptoms

With file data encrypted but headers left plain, the names inside the archive are readable and the archive can be listed; only extraction of contents needs the passphrase. With header encryption enabled, the listing itself is unreadable, and the tool must prompt before it can report what the archive contains. The second form is what produces a prompt at the instant the archive opens rather than partway through extraction, and it explains why some clients cannot display a file list for a job halted at this point.

What resolution actually involves

The passphrase is distributed separately from the articles, so it exists in metadata attached by the poster or the indexer: the NZB meta element, the release's .nfo file, or the indexer page the NZB was obtained from. Where none of those carries it, no local setting and no change of provider will open the archive, and the queue entry can only be cleared. Most clients can be configured to move such jobs out of the active queue automatically rather than leaving them waiting on input indefinitely, which matters for an unattended setup where one paused job can stall the rest of the queue.