jimbach13-Wuw85uim5zDR7s880joybQ posted on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:06:12 +0000 as excerpted:
> I just started using pan a few weeks after upgrading to a windows 7 pc. > In the past I just used outlook express to read newsgroups and to view > picture groups. In OE, I could combine and view multiple messages at > once. Can I do this with pan? I can highlight a bunch of headers, but > can't find away to combine and decode them. You can, but pan will normally do it for you -- automatically, you don't even know it's a multi-part that would need combining and decoding on OE! That is, pan has an algorithm that looks for messages posted in several segments, and combines them into a single entry in the headers (actually overviews, as it only shows a relatively limited number of headers corresponding roughly to those in overviews) tab. Thus, when you see a single entry there and click to display it, pan may be combining multiple articles "as posted split" and combining them back into a single message for display. However, pan's algorithm has a few limitations. First, there's two types of splitting, pre-post splitting, where a usually quite huge file (think hundreds-meg CD ISO or several-gig DVD ISO) is split into several files before posting, and while-posting splitting, where an individual message may be split by the posting client into several individual articles. For still pictures (as opposed to video, or ISOs, music can go either way) and other reasonably small attachments, this latter method is normally used exclusively, while the pre-post file-splitting into multiple files for posting method is normally used only for much larger attachments. pan handles while-posting-split recombining automatically, assuming it detects it, but as pre-post-split files actually appear as multiple files, that's the way pan leaves them -- you recombine those yourself, using par2 or cat or whatever. Second, pan's algorithm depends on post titles appearing in a semi- standard format that it understands. Not all posters use a format pan understands, and it can't recombine those automatically. However, it does surprisingly good considering all it is using is the subject header, and there's several ways of indicating a multi-part post, conflicting with the way posts that are part of a series are sometimes marked. One form of this, in combined binary and discussion groups, pan's algorithm sometimes gets in wrong on replies where the poster (or posting client) didn't change the subject appropriately. Thus, text messages are sometimes considered parts of a binary, and pan, thinking there's more to it, won't download it automatically. It's possible to read these text messages by forcing pan to download and display them. Choose articles menu, read article, or context-click (aka right-click) on the entry in the overviews (aka headers) list and select read article from there. That forces pan to download what it can and display it, which in this case would be the whole article since pan thought it was a multipart with only one part available, but it was instead a text response to a multipart. The same force-read technique can be used when it really is a message with a binary attachment but only some of the articles for it are available. In this case, it forces pan to download what it can get and create the attached file(s) with some gaps in it (them). Meanwhile, as a last resort, you can have pan save the raw articles, and use another tool to combine and decode them, manually. yencode is useful for this, or uudeview (part of uuenview), or uudecode (uuencode), or... Talking about which... on many binary groups most attachments are posted as yEnc. I haven't used MS software for years[1], but last I knew, it didn't handle yenc at all, and on encodings where it did work (uuencode and base64), would often mess up on recombining parts, ordering part 10-19 before part 2, etc, unless you manually sorted things out in the combine-and-decode dialog first. Pan handles all that automatically, too. =:^) Finally, while the current official pan release (0.135, if you're still on something earlier, you or your distro is behind!) doesn't have binary uploading, current builds from Heinrich Mueller's experimental pan repository do. =:^) There's also a number of other useful additional features in these builds, including (still quite experimental but works for me) SSL support, automatic score-based actions (auto-delete, often used for ignored, auto-mark-read, often used either for ignored if not auto-deleted, or low/negative-scored-but-not-ignored, and auto-download, often used for watched), etc. However, these features are only in hmueller's experimental repo at present, and are normally only available if you download the sources and build them yourself, altho someone (Steve D?) might be making them available pre-built for MSWormOS, I haven't kept track. Oh, and aside from Steve, Travis is the regular here who normally uses pan on MSWormOS. If you're running pan on MS, therefore, he might be able to provide help, there. ..... [1] I ran the betas for MSIE and MSOE 4, 5, and 5.5, back before the turn of the century. I also ran 6 before I switched to Linux, but not the beta, as by that time the nature of the still-coming eXPrivacy was known and I was throwing all my time into researching a switch to Linux. I'm not going to ask MS' permission before I run software I purchased, on my own computer, thankyou! Of course that was before I switched to all freedomware... no black-box binary-only servant-ware for me! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
