[Pan-users] Re: Does Pan have an addressbook?

[Duncan]

Beartooth posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Mon, 12 Jul 2004 15:43:08 -0400:

> I'm forever finding things in places like this that I want in my own files
> -- and forwarding them to myself to get them there. But both my addresses
> are somewhat tedious to type. I'd like to create nicknames, Pine-style,
> for both -- and for a few others whom I commonly trade alerts with. Is
> there any way to do that? I didn't find it. :-(
> 
> If there isn't, can we hope for one in the foreseeable future??

No such thing that I know of, nor have I seen it discussed b4, so what the
effort required to institute it might be or the chances of getting it
instituted in some relatively decent time frame, I don't know.

Normally, I'd suggest select/pasting from the from line, unless it's
entirely munged, but that's not going to work with PAN, since that widget
won't allow text selection.

There are possibilities with the reply-to and custom headers, however. 
You might put your address in the reply-to as well, for servers such as
gmane that are list oriented anyway.  For general usenet, you may wish to
munge, altho reply-to isn't as easily harvested as from, because reply-to
isn't in the overviews, so any harvesters must d/l the individual messages
to harvest reply-to addresses.  Still, you may wish to use a custom header
instead, keeping in mind that reply-tos really should be unmunged, and
custom headers should begin with x- to denote them as custom headers.  You
still may wish to munge to some extent your address and place it in a
somewhat non-obvious header, but something like

x-custom: foiler&user&domain.tld

with a generic header such as x-custom giving no hint it's a mail address,
and the form of munging also giving no hint, but remaining fairly simple
to select simply user&domain.tld from it, and then change the & to an @..
something like that might be less tedious, depending on HOW tedious your
addresses ARE to type.

Of course, another possibility is getting another address, one that's a
bit easier to type.  My current ISP allows seven addresses, and I have a
dedicated one for news, and another for lists (which gets used on the
gmane list2news gateway lists as news, as well).  With a dedicated
address, you can kill it if it starts getting to much spam and get
another.  Another trick I use on my news address, is subject keyword
filtering.  The subject must end with " -news", that is, space dash news,
or it automatically gets trashed.  Set up a filter like that, or even more
unique, -news4ward, say, and of course remember to tack that on anything
you forward, and it'll help keep the spam at bay even with an address that
isn't to difficult to type (however, do still make the address
username nine or more characters long, as an 8-char or less username is
trivial to hit with a random dictionary attack).  If your ISP account
doesn't have more addresses available to use, try a free yahoo or whatever
account, or pay a few bucks a year ($20/year gets a decent account w/o
ads, and with POP and/or IMAP support, from a number of providers).

Yet another possibility is running a local mail server and configuring PAN
to connect to it.  It would then relay to your ISP (or deliver directly,
if allowed) for remote addresses, or deliver directly to your local
mailbox for local ones.  (At least KMail allows me to configure a local
maildir or mbox format location to directly fetch from as an additional
account, in addition to the traditional POP/IMAP fetching.  Most *ix mail
clients should have some sort of local fetching ability.)

Maybe that'll give you some ideas to work with, anyway, tho an address
book /would/ be nice, at some point.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin