Re: [Pan-users] can't post articles

[Duncan]

Peter Mitchell posted on Fri, 15 Sep 2023 09:14:35 +0100 as excerpted:

> Hi. Just installed Pan 0.146 on a Linux Mint machine, but it doesn't let
> me post text or articles to usenet newsgroups. When I try to send the
> post it opens a dialog box with the message:
>      There were problems with this post.
>      Error:Bad email address.
> 
> News server is eternal-september (with registered user account)

Hmm.  0.146 is old (bordering on ancient?).  0.154 is current, released 
back on January 5 so even it has been around for 8 months.  0.146 is from 
Oct of 2019, so nearing four years ago.  It's worth noting that back then 
pan was still mostly dormant and bit-rotting.  The people trying to care 
for it were doing their best to at least keep pan on life support (for 
which I definitely thank them!) but were at the limit of their skills, and 
pan badly needed help to finish porting it ported to gtk3/gmime3 and get 
the porting bugs worked out, because the gtk2/gmime2 that pan was still 
using back then was itself on life support, being phased out by the distros 
with all the attendant bit-rot bugs that nobody cared about as it was all 
going away anyway.

With 0.147, Dominique Dumont, Debian's pan maintainer, stepped up as 
upstream pan maintainer as well, and since then he has been the steady 
maintainer hand (head?) that pan really needed.  It took a few releases, 
but by 0.151 or so pan was through most of the 3.x porting pain and was far 
more stable (certainly so for me!) than it had been in years.  (But I'm 
still glad someone had been at least able to keep it alive, for DD to pick 
up!)

Meanwhile, if your distro pan is that old, likely its gmime is similarly 
old, and gmime/pan/the-combination had a number of header-parsing bugs back 
then including one where the server was refusing the bugged garbage I was 
attempting to send, very similar to what you're reporting.

Try to get more log detail with what you have.  Open the logger (click the 
icon at the bottom right in the status bar or event log in the file menu), 
clear the log so it won't have a bunch of stuff from startup, and try to 
send something.

I suspect (if it's the bug I had, or similar) the logged error will make it 
clear that the server doesn't like what it's being sent, because pan (or 
the gmime pan is using for MIME processing including header management) is 
sending it garbage despite having a valid address.  If so... well... 
upgrading eventually fixed the problem for me, and pan has been nicely 
stable including for posting for I guess a couple years now.

While you can try building just pan, given that the bug might actually be 
in gmime it may or may not fix it, and upgrading gmime of course brings 
with it the possibility of breaking anything else using gmime.  Plus you 
may have other packages that current pan needs upgraded first before it can 
build properly.  So honestly, the easiest fix is likely either to upgrade 
the whole distro, including pan, gmime, gtk...

Or ... depending on how much you /need/ pan vs the hassle of an upgrade, 
perhaps try something else that hopefully could post better back in 2019.  
If I'm not mistaken, eternal-september (or at least the free accounts 
they're known for, not sure if they have paid ones) is a low-volume 
primarily-text server, definitely easier to deal with than high-volume 
binaries.

What I did some of back when I had the problem was use pan for reading, but 
something else for posting.  I used claws-mail (which does news tho I 
prefer pan for that, but which I use for mail and feeds anyway), but as 
your headers suggest you posted this message with thunderbird (which I 
/think/ still does news) you'd presumably use that.  You can either switch 
to it and refetch the message you intend to reply to, to do so, or play 
around a bit with pan's reply via email feature, as that opens up your 
email client (thunderbird I guess).  In my case I was on gmane for the 
mailing lists anyway, so I could just mail it to the list directly once I 
got it to my mail client, but if you're lucky and the mail and news are 
integrated enough, once a news server is setup to post to, one might be 
able to just delete the email address from one spot and add the newsgroup 
to a different spot, to post to the newsgroup instead.

Alternatively, if you're mostly doing text anyway (as eternal-september 
suggests), the less efficient (limited to single-fetch thread for claws, 
not sure about thunderbird but I doubt it does parallel fetching as 
efficiently as pan) fetching may not be that big of a problem, and if the 
UI is at least tolerable as an emergency workaround, maybe just use 
thunderbird or whatever for both fetching/reading and posting, at least as 
a workaround until you /do/ have occasion to do a proper distro upgrade.

-- 
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