Re: [Pan-users] Wish List

[Jim Henderson]

gaw zay wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Marcelo Flores wrote:
> 
> > 1. In a lot of the a.b.p.* groups one post often includes more than one 
> > attachment. As far as I know Pan only allows you to download all the 
> > attachments. It would be great if you could select individual attachments 
> > for download. That would be really cool
> 
> I'm not sure I follow you here ... more verbose example perhaps?

The way I read it was this:

Sometimes a poster will post more than one attachment with a message;
for example, 2 or 3 JPGs.  Marcelo is asking for the ability to
selectively download attachments without downloading all of them.

I agree with him that this would be really neat, but I don't know how
you'd go about implementing it; the boundaries in the message are either
MIME boundaries or tagged by the "magic cookie" used for some encoding
schemes (I think yEnc uses this method).  Since the nntp protocol
doesn't inherently support binary formats (which is why we have encoding
in the first place), there's no way to ask the news server just for
attachment information; it's not stored in the header, so you have to
download the entire message body anyways just to find the attachment
information.

Jim