Steven D'Aprano posted on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:29:19 +1100 as excerpted:
On 17/12/12 05:06, Duncan wrote:
What /might/ be a problem, however, is the "pseudo-newsgroup" setup
old-
pan used for its saved and sent messages folders. There's nothing like
that in new-pan. Instead, messages are saved in-place in the
newsgroup,
There is no "might" about it. This is absolutely a problem. Just because
a post is sent doesn't mean that it is received. I have lost multiple
large posts, with no way to recreate them, because I've sent a post but
it was never received by the newserver, or dropped, or *something* went
wrong and it was lost.
NNTP is not a guaranteed delivery service. It has even fewer guarantees
than email: with email, at least, you can expect a bounce message if
your post is not deliverable. (Even that is not a guarantee though.)
This is one area that Pan is, frankly, stuck badly in the 1980s. It
truly is shocking that Pan keeps no record of sent posts. Even more
shocking is that Pan's handling of the Save Draft command is stuck back
in the 1970s: I have lost more than one draft because I have
accidentally entered the file name of an existing draft when saving, and
Pan *didn't* ask for confirmation before overwriting the file.
(Disclaimer: I am using Pan 0.133 because that is the version offered by
my distro's package management system.)
Somewhere somewhat after 0.133, I believe, I think by 0.135 but don't
know whether it made 0.134, Heinrich did give pan's draft feature an auto-
save. So if pan crashed or you otherwise know the message didn't get thru
before you post the next message, you can retrieve the auto-save now,
thus retrieving most of your work (quite a nice thing for the multi-
hundred-line posts I sometimes make).
And of course you can manually save a draft if it's a post you spent
quite a lot of work on and you want to be sure. But the autosave's nice,
as I tend to think about it just after I hit the send button, and before
that was too late, but now I can simply open the auto-save and save it
off as something else, to post again later if I need to.
The other thing that's nice about the autosave, is that it gives a person
a not too terrible way to work around pan's wrapping issues, when you
want most of the post wrapped, but need a few lines, say some long URLs
or a table, NOT wrapped. The round trip to a file and back means pan
doesn't rewrap the content from the file, only the new content or if you
manually change the wrapping. So it's possible to turn wrapping on,
save, take the default autosave choice, then restore, again taking the
default autosave choice, THEN hit the unwrap button, and it'll not rewrap
the content that came from the file, but allows you to unwrap individual
lines. Again, the most frequent thing I use that for is for long URL
lines, but it's occasionally useful for tables or other aligned data that
pan would otherwise wrap, if you had wrapping on for your normal
paragraphs.