[Pan-users] Re: Pan reloading messages marked as read

[Duncan]

Jeremy Elliott posted on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:21:52 -0700 as excerpted:

> Hi, for some reason, in the last week or so, Pan keeps re-loading
> messages that I've already marked as read. For example, I'll load Pan
> and hit the button to Get New Headers in Subscribed Groups. It will go
> through its business, but when I go into it, it has old messages that
> I've already read and marked as read. I've tried deleting my entire
> configuration folder, but that didn't help. Any ideas?
> 
> I'm using Pan 0.134: "Wait For Me", on a Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
> platform.

First, please refrain from posting HTML to the pan list. It appears you're 
using yahoo, presumably webmail.  They should have an option to send only 
plain text.  Please use it.  (If you did it by accident, don't worry about 
it, that's what this request is for, to let you know and ask that you 
change it for the next post.)

For the reloading messages already marked as read, that's /often/ a 
problem with your news server's per-group message numbering, but there's 
some caveats...

Normally, the numbers will be sequential and pan tracks the numbers it has 
seen.  But if the server has problems and restores from backup but losing 
track of the sequence numbers it originally assigned, or if you switch to 
a different server using different numbering, pan and the news server have 
different ideas of what numbers apply to a particular message so pan will 
either show it again as unread, or worse yet, show new messages as already 
read, in which case pan may not even download them unless you tell it to 
get all headers.

The problem can also be an issue with chaotic pan shutdown, since it only 
saves its state when you switch groups or quit pan.  If pan (or the entire 
system) crashes when you've been working in a group for awhile, when it 
restarts, it will have forgotten everything you did in that group since 
you last entered it, since it didn't have a chance to save state as it 
crashed.  But that should only be for the group it was in when it happened.

Similarly, if you somehow get two instances of pan running at once, there 
can be a bit of a mixup, with the last one leaving a group (or quitting) 
writing the state it was tracking when it did so, sometimes overwriting 
what the other one did.

Finally, pan's behavior in the case of cross-posts can be... complex.  
There's another thread about that here from a few days ago.  Basically, if 
you're working with messages cross-posted to several groups, where you 
follow more than one of them, you should turn off pan's option to get new 
headers when you enter the group, and always use the get new headers in 
subscribed groups action, so all groups are fetched at once.  If that is 
done, then pan should properly mark crossposted messages as read in all 
groups when they're read in one.  But if the headers get out of sync 
between groups, they may only get marked read in the current group, and 
you might end up seeing them again when you switch to the group they were 
crossposted to.

-- 
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