Re: [Pan-users] Seeing contents of 'Sent' postings that were never posted

[Duncan]

Dave posted on Tue, 04 Dec 2018 22:05:53 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Tue, 04 Dec 2018 19:32:34 +0000, Maurice wrote:
> 
>> In my Pan /Local_folders/Sent group I see the Subject line of several
>> ostings that never arrived in the target NG.
>> 
>> How does one retrieve the text of one of those files?
> 
> I think the sent folder only holds place markers to the posts you send. 
> To see them in the sent folder, you have to read them from the server so
> they go into the cache.  If they never made it to the server in the
> first place, then your out of luck.

Based on my observation here, that's not correct, pan does save sent 
posts locally, but I can see why it (temporary) looks like it doesn't.

Try quitting and restarting pan.  You should then see the cached icon 
beside the sent messages and be able to display them.

Tho I'm not sure whether sent messages count in the default 10 MiB cache 
size or not, as I have my cache size set to GiBs so auto-cache-rotation 
basically doesn't happen at all.  If the cache size does apply, for 
people doing binaries at least, sent messages will still be kicked out of 
cache pretty fast, because for binaries 10 MiB is tiny.  Tho they could 
last a few sessions if you're doing text only, as 10 MiB of text is more 
than many will read in a session.

The reason it takes a restart is because pan is effectively faking the 
sent "group", and because it's a fake, there's no server to download 
from, automatically updating what's cached in the process, so the only 
time pan actually checks what messages are actually there is when it 
starts.  So until a restart, you see the "headers" for any messages sent 
in the session, but the messages aren't actually available to read until 
a restart.

I too have had to go digging in sent messages for a post that didn't make 
it to the server, and yes, having to restart to see the actual message is 
a pain, but definitely not as much of a pain as having to retype the 
entire thing!


Of course the other alternative would be to dig the message out of the 
filesystem where pan's actually storing it (in ~/.pan2/article-cache/, I 
believe, by default, I point it elsewhere using the $PAN_HOME var, and 
have for years, so for all I know they've changed it back to .pan, 
instead of .pan2, again), reading it with a standard text editor.  I've 
done that with messages from the server, but the process should be the 
same for sent messages, I'd guess.  YMMV on whether that's more 
convenient than restarting pan, tho.

-- 
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