[Pan-users] Re: <searching|reading> saved articles?

[Duncan]

Steven D'Aprano posted on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:34:21 +1100 as excerpted:

> For what it's worth, I agree with Petr. The removal of the
> automatically-save-sent-emails functionality was very nearly a deal
> breaker for me:

Well, they're saved automatically, the same as any other post you 
download, and expired automatically, at the time you tell it to expire, 
the same as any other post you download...

But I agree, the feature would indeed be a good one to have.  It's simply 
that, perhaps unfortunately but it's a real world we live in, there's 
very little actual new development going on with pan, and hasn't been 
for... 2.5 years or so now, IIRC.  Before that, it was great guns (a beta 
every two weeks or less) for a bit over a year, as pan-0.90+, aka pan2, a 
total rewrite into C++ (older pan was C), was developed into something 
reasonably usable.  Before that, some 3 plus years (IDR how long, but at 
least that) had gone by with little development.  Before that, it was on-
again-off-again for several years.

All this time of course, pan has had only one major developer, Charles, 
tho others have pitched in with patches here and there.  And it's 
volunteer, in his free time, when he gets time and has an interest.  
Honestly, for a single main developer project line pan, it has stayed 
around a quite awhile.

Thus, the reality is, if you want a new feature, especially one obviously 
not on the priority list, you either better have the skills and the time 
to volunteer yourself, or have the money (or other persuasive assets) to 
dedicate to the project so someone else (pay Charles... or someone else 
if you prefer, to take a leave of absence from his paying job and code 
it, I'm sure he'd not mind! =:^) can do it.

Without that, it's just talk.  Yeah, it'd be nice, but it's unlikely to 
happen.

Of course, I have my own such "bluesky" feature on my wish-list as well.  
In my case, it's the ability to score on headers not in the overview, and 
on the entire body.  Presently, pan only scores on info typically found 
in the overview.  The current overview-only scoring is because that way, 
download can be avoided, if the message is killfiled or doesn't score 
high enough.  But, while avoiding download is nice, it's my attention 
that really counts, and I'd /love/ the ability to score on the entire 
message, thus non-overview headers and the message body, even tho the 
message would still have to be downloaded to do it, because that way, I 
could at least automatically avoid having to look at the junk, even if I 
had to download it.

But as I hinted, my years old (before old-C pan even had scoring, the 
request is from when it was normal/watch/ignore and only based on a 
single criteria, only, so it's likely a decade old, now) request for this 
feature, which would have done /me/ so much good, was marked "bluesky", 
which is basically, "it'd be nice, someday, when I can't think of 
anything else better to do, or if someone else codes it and submits the 
patch".  Unfortunately, I'm not a coder, or pan would have had that 
feature probably about 9 years ago...

So yeah, I know the feeling, and I agree it'd be nice, but if you're not 
a coder...

> I've lost a year or two worth of posts, never able to
> retrieve them, because of that. By the time I learned that Pan was no
> longer saving my sent posts, they had expired from the news-servers I
> have access too.

Ouch!

There is still hope, tho.  Some of the pay servers have extremely long 
text retention (a year or more, could be indefinite, as storage size is 
increasing faster than the volume of text-only posts), so provided you 
remember the groups and the posting handle, if you check around, you may 
be able to buy a few months' worth of access and download them from 
there.  Also, dejanews (sorry, google-news now days) may have them, for 
text groups.

> I note that the Pan home page still falsely claims that:
> 
> "Pan saves your posted messages in a folder for future reference."
> 
> This is incorrect. It does no such thing. You have to manually save
> posted messages as a DRAFT, before sending, otherwise Pan does not save
> it.

Good point!  I guess we need to file a bug and have Charles remove that.  
Well, or add the feature back.  But the latter unfortunately isn't all 
that likely, at least not without a patch supplied with the bug, and 
letting khaley know about it here too, so he can add the patch to his 
branch for testing, first, so Charles can just pull it from there.  That 
seems to be the way things are shaping up for the next version or two, 
anyway.

> Not to put too fine a point on it, it's ridiculous that a news/mail
> client (Pan sends email too) doesn't automatically save sent posts.

Correction.  New-pan doesn't really send mail.  It simply invokes the 
mail-to: protocol handler as setup for your platform (provided of course 
that pan is setup for even that).  Your mailto: handler client does the 
mail handling.

Which may be another invalid claim on the pan site, I've not checked in 
awhile.

-- 
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