Re: [Pan-users] Re: sent posts??

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:00:14 am Duncan wrote:

> Beartooth Sciurivore <address@hidden> posted
> address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 20 Feb 2008
> 18:44:05
>
> +0000:
> > In Old Pan, I used to be able to get to copies of posts I had sent,
> > which were often useful for a variety of purposes. If there's a
> > file of them anywhere in New Pan, I have yet to find it.
> >
> >     Is there? Or is it coming back, when Charles gets to it? Or ...?
>
> It's not scheduled back at this time, no.

Then somebody should go and remove the falsehood on the Pan homepage:

"Pan saves your posted messages in a folder for future reference."

http://pan.rebelbase.com/features/

and replace it with "Pan defaults to throwing your data away without 
telling you."

Personally, I feel cheated that Pan suddenly stopped saving posted 
messages without warning. I've lost MONTHS of posts because that 
functionality was removed. Pan tells you that it saves your data when 
you send it, and then it doesn't. And this isn't a bug, it's by design. 
Unbelievable.


> There were various problems with the old scheme as it required pan to
> set the message-id itself, while most posting clients let the server 
> do it. (Pan had to set it itself because it stores messages based on
> ID, so to store posted messages they had to have an ID already.) 

What nonsense. To store posted messages, Pan just needed to make sure 
that they had a unique file name. That unique file name doesn't need to 
be the message ID, it could be a timestamp, or even a string 
like "sent-message%N" where %N is replaced by an incrementing counter, 
or the first ten characters of the subject line plus a unique suffix.

Saving sent messages doesn't imply that Pan has to treat them as 
incoming news messages, and saving them is FAR more important than the 
ability to treat the folder as if it were a newsgroup. That's not 
important. Saving the message in the first place is critical.


> There was also the issue of being unable to ever see the message as
> everyone else saw it, because once it was posted, pan always showed
> you the local copy, which in the case of stuff you posted, was the
> copy it took before it hit the server.

Are you saying that when you were looking at *newsgroup* Foo, and 
downloaded your message from the server, Pan would show you the local 
copy in *folder* Bar instead?


> So Charles just cut that option entirely.  What he put in its place
> was the save draft option.  This isn't automatic, but if you use it,
> you get a copy as a draft, then can reopen it and send it without
> losing the local copy.  (You only lose your draft if you delete the
> message file pan saved.)

Tthis demonstrates nicely that the excuse for removing the 
save-sent-message option is bogus. Pan has the ability to save your 
posts as plain text files in a folder. You can do it manually. Why 
doesn't Pan just create a folder "Sent Posts" and do it automatically?


> One possible workaround would be putting something in the mailto
> line. Since that causes pan to invoke your mail client, you can then
> save the message there, with or without actually sending it.  (You
> don't have to mail a copy to yourself, IOW, just save it once it
> comes up in your mail client, as you would any other mail message
> before you send it.)

Mail clients save sent messages, unless you explicitly tell them not to. 
You don't need an explicit "save this email" step in any mail client 
I've ever used.



-- 
Steven