[Pan-users] Re: Search messages

[Duncan]

terryc <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 28 Apr 2009
10:55:54 +1000:

> How do you search message subjects and body under Pan? Can not locate
> the search funtion.

Look in the toolbar.  There's a drop-down edit-box that says Subject or 
Author by default.  You can also choose only subject, only author, or 
message-id, b4 you type in your keyword.

Unfortunately pan's ability to work with the message body, or for that 
matter, headers other than those available in the overview, at all, 
whether searching or scoring, is basically non-existent.  For years I've 
wanted full message scoring/filtering ability, among other things, and 
requested it before pan even had scoring, while it was still simple 
ignore/watch/normal filtering, but Charles prioritized it at "bluesky", 
meaning not likely unless someone with the coding ability I don't have 
submits a patch for it.

For search, however, there's a workaround, provided the message is still 
in the (10 MB by default) cache, reasonably likely for text-only users 
but not so much for those doing binaries where the cache is tiny.  Just 
do a filesystem (not pan) search of the cache (a subdir of ~/.pan2 by 
default, named article-cache or article_cache I'm not sure which as it 
changed at some time in the past and I ended up symlinking one to the 
other, here).

Filesearching the cache, you'll come up with a file or list of files with 
names matching (as closely as easily possible on a filesystem, a few 
strange message-id characters may be replaced by more commonly allowed 
chars) the message-ids of the messages in question.  You can then open 
those files, basically the raw text format of the messages in question, 
in a normal text editor, or use pan's message-id search as mentioned 
above to find them in pan.

> Nor the print either.

Here's the story on printing.  For years, gtk2 had no native printing 
tools -- that was all in gnome and Charles didn't want to require the 
gnome libraries to get it nor was he willing to implement all that code 
stand-alone, so pan (well, pan newer than the 0.11 series that depended 
gnome-1, back about the turn of the century) simply didn't have printing.

gtk2 has in fact supported printing for several versions now, but the 
feature has not yet been added to the C++ rewrite, the 0.1xx versions 
including the 0.132 you mention.

Again, there's a workaround.  This is what I've been suggesting for 
years.  Simply use pan's save-as feature to save the message-text, then 
open the resulting file in your favorite print-capable text editor, edit 
out the headers, etc, if you don't want them printed, and print from 
there.

> Version 0.132 distributed nder Debian lenny

0.133 is current, now nearing a year old (August 1).  Among other things, 
it fixed a security vuln.  However, the same patch applied in 0.133 to 
fix that was applied by various distributions to 0.132 as well, and 0.133 
is pretty much just a bugfix with that and other fixes applied, fixes 
that Debian was likely applying to 0.132 before 0.133 came out with them 
merged back upstream.  If you're worried about that security vuln, I'd 
suggest double-checking the Debian changelog to see if a patch for 
security was added about a year ago (May thru July timeframe).  If so, 
you should be fine.  Otherwise, consider upgrading to 0.133 which as I 
said merged the patch upstream, either compiling it yourself or grabbing 
it from the download pointer for Debian on pan.rebelbase.com.  
(Personally I run Gentoo, so "Debian Lenny" doesn't tell me as much as 
the fact that 0.132 is the pan version it's shipping, indicating it's 1-2 
years behind pan's own current version, 0.133.)

-- 
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