Re: [Pan-users] Oh, for draft folder!

[Steven D'Aprano]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> (5) If the user sends the post, Pan should save the post in a Sent Posts 
> location, then delete the auto-save file. Pan may choose to move the 
> auto-save file to Sent Posts instead.)
>
> (6) Sent posts should not be treated as downloaded news posts. It is a 
> record of what you sent, that is all. Whether or not the user then 
> downloads a copy of their post from the news server has no bearing on 
> whether or not they have a copy of what they sent.


I've had a look at what Thunderbird and Knode do.

Thunderbird seems to do a good job of integrating news and mail, which 
is probably overkill for Pan. But for the record, Sent Posts are stored 
by default in your local Sent Mail folder. The post is stored in a 
standard mbox file, and the headers look like this:

From - Sun Jun 26 14:44:37 2011
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:44:36 +1000
From: Steven D'Aprano <address@hidden>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 (X11/20070719)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: alabama.test
Subject: testing 1 2 3 4
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit


Knode seems a good match with Pan. It also saves sent messages in a mbox 
file. Here's the headers from a post:

From address@hidden Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 1997
X-KNode-Overview: testing testing       alabama.test            2
Message-Id: <address@hidden>
From: address@hidden
Subject: testing testing
Newsgroups: alabama.test
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 15:20:04 +1000
Lines: 2
User-Agent: KNode/0.10.9
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit

Although the message ID is stored in the sent post, Knode does not try 
to match up the sent post with the post in the news group. E.g. if I 
download the post from the newsgroup, I get slightly different headers 
from those appearing in the mbox:

The separator line "From address@hidden Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 1997" is gone;
X-Knode-Overview header is gone;
Path, Organization, NNTP-Posting-Host and X-Trace headers are added.


It seems to me that using a standard mail format, like maildir or mbox, 
is almost certainly the right way to store sent posts. That gives you a 
way of viewing sent posts for free: point your mail client at it.




--
Steven