[Pan-users] Re: How to remove MIME encoding?

[Duncan]

Vitaly Samourov <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below,
on  Tue, 01 May 2007 00:28:40 +0400:

> I have tested this (group preferences -> koi-8r), but it does not help.

As I said, I have little knowledge of i18n (internationalization, i, 18 
letters, n, in this case, as related to charsets), so can't directly help 
with that.

> Could the problem be here? -> Thunderbird uses my smtp server for
> outgoing posts, but Pan allows sending only via news server (Am I
> correct?)
> 
> Maybe news server does a MIME re-encoding?

I don't fully understand fidonet or other moderated newsgroups either, in 
part because I've not had to deal with such groups very often, so have 
never /had/ to understand them in ordered to troubleshoot.  If it didn't 
work, I just skipped it and went elsewhere.  However, that said, here's 
how I understand them to work, but perhaps you know this and more and 
should be explaining things to me?

Moderated newsgroups (including fidonet groups as gated to USENET), 
unlike other newsgroups, don't immediately make available posts to them.  
Posts must instead be forwarded (via mail) to the official group 
moderator, who then either approves or rejects the post.  If it's 
approved, it's reposted to the newsgroup with a header indicating 
approval.  (It is said that one notorious moderated hacker group was in 
fact specifically setup with a fake moderator, the idea being that those 
who knew enough to be able to correctly fake the approved header were by 
definition qualified to post.  Now days, I understand most moderated 
groups use key-signed approvals, making faking the approval rather more 
difficult.)

Thus, while a properly configured on the server moderated group should 
allow posting, but then forward them to the moderator (via mail) rather 
than making them directly available in the group as usual, it's also 
possible for a news client, given the proper information about the group, 
to mail the moderator directly, bypassing the news server, so while the 
server is used to download messages, they are posted via mail instead.

AFAIK you are correct, pan doesn't do this by default (maybe thunderbird 
does, I wouldn't know, nor would I know if additional information is 
necessary for it to do so if it does).

However, pan CAN use your mailer to reply via mail as well or instead of 
replying via group.  This is normally used to send a reply directly to 
the poster (via mail) as well as to the group, but it can be used to send 
the reply anywhere via mail, including to the group moderator directly if 
you have the address available to put in.  Simply put an email address in 
the mailto header, deleting anything in the newsgroups header, and pan 
will then hand off to your regular mailer (or whatever you have pan 
configured to use for mail, it must handle mailto: protocol however, some 
don't) for processing.  

Here, my configured mailer is kmail (pan is set to use the KDE default, 
which is kmail in my configuration), which is setup to add its own sig 
and etc.  Thus, unless I intervene when the message pops up in kmail 
before it's sent from there, anything pan forwards via mail gets two 
sigs, the pan sig and the kmail sig, and is sent from kmail's default 
address (which is not the one I use for news), so I must remember to 
change it in the mailer before I tell it to send.

As for fidonet, they are their own network that AFAIK predated or at 
least grew up in parallel to USENET.  As such, they must be gateway-ed to 
USENET, and what you see in pan when you see a fidonet group is the 
gateway-ed fidonet group.  As gateway-ed newsgroups, fidonet groups 
appear as moderated groups.  However, I /believe/ they are in some ways 
easier to automate than regular moderated newsgroups, in that a single 
moderator normally covers a whole segment of fidonet.  Thus, it's 
relatively ease for a news client such as thunderbird that does mail as 
well, to be configured to direct-mail the moderator, instead of posting 
to the moderated group on the server and hoping the server is configured 
properly to forward the message from there.  Regardless, pan doesn't 
pretend to be a mail client, only a news client, so it hands mail off to 
your mailer as explained above.  This will by definition make it harder 
to automate such read-via-news-post-via-mail things, and at present, pan 
doesn't do it.  You either send to the newsgroup and hope the server is 
configured correctly to forward to the moderator, or you send the reply 
via mail and manually put in the moderator's address.  That bypasses the 
news server, but course you must know the moderator's address in ordered 
to do it, and it'd be a hassle to do in any sort of volume.

However, if you are active in a lot of fidonet groups, it would perhaps 
be better to use them directly, rather than trying to gateway thru 
usenet.  As I said, however, I know little about fidonet, so just how to 
do that is as they say, "left as an exercise for the reader." <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