[Pan-users] Re: leafnode and seperate headers/bodies

[Duncan]

ivanova posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Wed, 23 Jun 2004 20:38:43 +0200:

> I'm using leafnode and pan as a newsreader. Leafnode is configured to
> initially just download the headers. I'm still on slow dialup so I usually
> mark the messages I want to read, and download them. With the next
> fetchnews the bodies are downloaded.
> 
> There are two problems with this. Pan doesn't recognise the new messages
> and I can't turn off the cache. I have to close pan to empty the cache and
> then the whole message shows up. So not that big a problem but still...

Have you tried switching to a different group and switching back?  I'm not
familiar with LeafNode (except as a user back when one of my ISPs tried
it, and that was when I was still on MSWormOS), but I know that does make
PAN write out to disk some stuff, and reload it when you switch back to
the group.

> My second problem is that I can't distinguish between
> messages who's bodies are downloaded from messages without bodies.
> 
> Is there some way to mark the messages in some way? Any tips or
> recommendations?

PAN can do this based on its own cache, but it assumes the server has the
bodies already.

I don't know if it's possible to configure Leafnode to delay replying to
PAN until the message is fetched or not, but if so, that might fix the
problem on at least text groups.  (Binary groups would probably timeout b4
the post came in, on dialup.)

The other possibility is to set up filters to weed out subject you know
you are NOT interested in, and then either simply d/l the rest (try
putting it on a timer, to do once an hour, or an hour b4 you get home from
work, or whatever), or do the reverse, and mark subjects you know you are
interested in for d/l and have those waiting.  If you used similar scoring
filters in PAN, and set it to mark the various score levels by color, that
would be a good indicator of what was d/led and what not.

I don't know if Leafnode does filtering, however, or how they'd be setup
if it does.  If it doesn't, perhaps look at another news server package.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
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