news reader

[Robin Laing]

Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-01-19 at 13:23 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
>>But _why_ do people think Thunderbird or Pan
>>is better than KNode, which comes with KDE?
>>
>>Simply saying "I like Pan" is not much help.
> 
> 
> It's been a while since I tried out different clients, and when I tried
> out KNode I found it painful.  So here goes for comments about the
> others:
> 
> 
> Both of them just plain sucked at handling messages with files attached,
> compared to using something like Agent.  Using Agent, you could hop into
> some newsgroup with fan pictures from a TV show, for instance, select a
> group of messages, fetch them, and the attachments would end up in your
> downloads folder - no further action required of you.  It could even
> automatically put back together large multi-part messages.  On the other
> hand, other clients require you to go into each message and individually
> save out each attachment.  Some are a right pain to deal with multi-part
> messages.
> 

It may have been some time since you used Pan but I use it almost 
daily.  I was concerned when I heard that Pan was not included in FC4 
core.  I was happy to see it in extras.

Pan puts the saved attachments where I tell it to as any other reader 
that I have used.

  I use Pan for binary downloads because it now works so well with 
multi-part messages.  It will even put together segments of *.rar 
multipart rar files, even if part 2 or a 100 part message is missing. 
  This makes it much easier to recover using the PAR2 files.

If I look in a directory and there are 100 files or a multipart 
message that covers multiple files that are each multiple parts, I 
select the first one, scroll down to the last one and press shift and 
select the last one.  Shift S and the download/saving starts.

It will also mark messages in other folders as read if they are cross 
posted.  I understand that this is supposed to work across servers as 
well but I have not tried it yet.

My only complaint with Pan is uploading is not easy for multipart 
messages.