bcb posted on Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:46:06 +0000 as excerpted:
Can an option be added to pan (or did I miss it, using Windows 0.134
"wait for me") so that when someone posts a massive binary to a
non-binary group (or, I guess, any group) to display *only* the textual
portion of the message and not prompt me to download it?
To me, there's nothing more annoying (OK, that's not entirely true :-)
than reading through a non-binary group like pan.user (I read it through
gmane) and having the "mood" broken by an oversized pop-up asking me
what to do.
LOL. I got hit by that one too. =:^p
FWIW...
It's not an automatic option, but after you get over the interruption of
the download popup and cancel it (hitting esc works =:^) , if you want to
read whatever text, context-click and choose read-article.
It still downloads the full article (to cache), because nntp offers no
way to specify which segments contain text and which only encoded
attachments so the only way to know where the text is and display it is
to download the whole thing, but that DOES allow you to read the text and
see any still images attached as well, since pan displays them.
It is of course possible to set a keyboard accel for the read-message
function as well, if desired. However, it happens seldom enough here,
and by the time I decide I need the function, the damage to whatever flow
is already done by the popup, that I just left the function available via
menu only here, as I'd have trouble remembering what accel I had assigned
to it in any case.
FWIW you can do the same thing, basically, if you want to manually
download a multi-segment article that's missing some of them. Pan won't
download those automatically, but you can force it to, using the same
manual read-message functionality.
So at least you can read the message. There's no option to make handling
automatic, but at least you can read the message manually, if desired.