[Pan-users] Re: Switched servers, now new messages appear as read

[walt]

On Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:15:09 -0500, Scott I. Remick wrote:

> Am experiencing an odd problem. I recently switched USENET providers,
> and now when new messages come in on subscribed groups, a lot of times
> they are already marked read which is really messing things up. These
> are groups I was subscribed to before on my old USENET provider so I'm
> suspecting that some old data is being carried over. I have already
> tried unsubscribing and re-subscribing to some of the groups but to no
> avail. I would think that should be sufficient to clear out old index
> data, but I guess not (making this a bit of a bug). An official bug-fix
> aside, any suggestions on a good way to clear out this info? I'm not
> sure what files this data is being stored in.

Everything is stored in ~/.pan2 and I highly recommend looking through
those files to see how pan organizes its data.  Most everything is in
fairly readable XML format.

I agree that there is a bug in pan's method of marking articles as read
or deleted.  The problem is compounded when using multiple servers to
read any one group, because each server assigns its own article number
to each post.

That means that pan must figure out which article number on all of your
servers represents one real article and flag that article number on each
server as read (even though the article number will be different on each
server).

Pan does that by caching each article by its (allegedly unique) Message-ID
in ~/.pan2/article-cache/ and then working backwards to mark that unique
article as read for each server using its server-specific article number.

Just thinking about reading that code gives me a headache, so I haven't.
It'll take more than caffeine to get me that revved up :o)

Meanwhile, you might try starting from scratch by using 'Get all headers'
in one of your groups to see what it does.  I'd guess it will mark all
articles as unread, and you can then mark them read as you please.