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

[Jeremy Elliott]

> From: Duncan <address@hidden>
> 
> To: address@hidden
> Sent: Fri, April 8, 2011 3:23:44 AM
> Subject: [Pan-users] Re: Pan reloading messages marked as read
> 
> 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.)

Sorry about that, I never use formatting, but as far as I know, there's no way 
to make Yahoo default to plain text. I changed it for this, should be OK now.

> 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.

I could understand this one, but it would only be for a day or so, right? This 
has been going on for 3-4 days now.

> 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.

I've had this happen before, that's why I didn't worry about it the first day. 
Problem is, it keeps happening, and it's kinda annoying.

> 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.

I've done this before. Comes from clicking things too fast on my Start menu.

> 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.

I've saw this before, too, and in fact I'm used to it. Also, I have the option 
turned off, and always do use that button to get new headers, since sometimes I 
may leave my computer for a while when it's downloading, before finishing 
reading my messages.

> -- 
> 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

Thanks for the answer, and I may have straightened it out, at least in some 
groups. I realized I'd missed downloading some things, went back into just that 
group (without loading new headers), pulled the messages back up and downloaded 
the files I was looking for. The next time I started Pan and pulled the new 
headers, it didn't pull the ones it had been showing in that group. When I 
realized that by loading Pan later and pulling all headers, I finished reading 
all my groups, marked everything as read, then went back into every group 
before 
exiting Pan. I'm getting ready to start Pan up right now, so let me do that and 
add in the results.

Still hasn't fixed it in some groups, in others it seems to have worked. For 
example, in alt.binaries.e-book.fantasy, I'm seeing a bunch of messages from 
March 20, which obviously I've read by now, more than once.
Thanks