[Pan-users] Re: Seeing message in original format

[Duncan]

Kenneth P. Turvey posted
<address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on
Mon, 03 Oct 2005 14:09:58 -0500:

> Sometimes I would like to view a news message in its original format with
> all headers left alone and the message body just like it was sent to the
> NNTP server.  Ideally I would like to open it in an external editor.
> 
> Is there some way to do this in Pan?

No, but yes.  Not exactly within PAN, but yes, it can be done.

One way, view the raw message as it is found directly in the PAN cache:

First, within PAN, hit your "Show all headers" hotkey (or use the menu
entry) if necessary, to view the message-id.  This (with any non-fs-legal
characters substituted, don't remember what to, tho) plus the .msg
extension is the filename of the raw message in the PAN cache (normally
found under the PAN data dir, which is normally ~/.pan/data).  You should
therefore be able to open up that file from the cache, in your editor of
choice.

Do note, however, that you probably do **NOT** want to go browsing for it
in anything that displays filetype icons for all the files it lists (a
typical graphical file manager or even file-open dialog), particularly if
you have a cache of some size.  If you try, the file manager or open
dialog could easily be stuck for quite some time... reading the possibly
tens of thousands of files in the cache and trying to associate icons with
them all!  If it sounds as if I'm talking from experience, it's because I
am!  I made the mistake of trying to open the cache in Konqueror
at one point!  (Browsing the cache in something like midnight commander
(mc) is fine, as it's text based and doesn't try to assign icons or
whatever, so it's decently speedy.)

The "cache view" method should work even if PAN chokes on the message, for
some reason, as long as it was able to download it.  There is, however, an
easier way, under normal circumstances.  Just use PAN's save-as feature,
to save as text (not attachment).  That will normally spit out the "raw
text" message, including headers, still encoded attachments, and
everything.  It does NOT just spit out the viewable text (or at least
didn't used to, I haven't needed to try it in awhile, but haven't seen any
mention of it changing, either, so...).  Then you can simply open the file
you just saved in the editor of your choice.  

As I said, this is easier than the cache-view method, but it's possible
this won't work, if you've hit a bug and are trying to investigate why
PAN's choking on a particular message, for instance.  If PAN can't display
the message, it's rather difficult to have PAN save it!  <g>

-- 
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 in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html