Travis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:57:44 -0700:
> ----- Original Message ----- >> I run pan version 0.132. >> >> When I download a multipart message from news.usenetserver.com I get a >> lot of files with names like : >> >> M8WPj.14920$HY2.13951-epkf52SaZeZP2roSf1MJ43itZ/ >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> >> I got other extension too (so not only with usenetserver.com.msg). > You have Pan set to save "text" as well as the attachments. Travis is correct, depending on where you are looking, but here's a somewhat more detailed explanation. Pan saves messages using the (sanitized to filesystem safe) Message-ID, which according to the RFCs should be globally unique -- there should never be two different messages anywhere in the world at any time with the same Message-ID. Different news clients (and original posting servers, if the news client doesn't supply its own) use different algorithms to come up with the Message-ID, however. Many use some form of a combination of from address (either the poster's, or the posting server's) to hopefully keep collisions in "space" from occurring, timestamp, to keep collisions in time from occurring, and random number, just in case, but it's up to the implementation exactly what they use, as long as it's unique. That's why the message files appear to have such strange names -- they are based on the Message-ID, which isn't standardized except in the characters it may contain and that it must be unique, and isn't really designed for file-naming, the use to which pan puts it. Pan uses the Message-ID as a filename, however, in ordered to help keep things straight, since it's unique to the message and pan is designed to be able to track and know when it has already downloaded the same message across multiple servers. (The other form of message numbering, normally sequential by group, is server-specific, and therefore won't help tracking messages between servers.) All that said, normally, the only place these filenames appear is in pan's cache, which by default is pretty small, 10 MB. (The cache can be set larger manually, by editing preferences.xml in pan's settings dir directly. I run a multi-gigabyte cache, save to cache, and then sort and save off messages from there after they are all stored in local cache.) Since pan handles its cache automatically, you'll not normally see these files unless you go manually trawling thru the cache. However, if as Travis suggested, if you tell pan to save the text message itself, not just attachments, it'll save this more or less raw text message. This is nice if you want to save a text message, tho you may want to rename it to something more appropriate (say the subject) afterward. I do this from time to time. It's also useful on "broken" attachments that pan can't properly save on its own, however, as it may be possible to recover the attachment using other tools designed to deal for the purpose. I do this too, occasionally. So basically, if you are telling pan to save the text message not just the attachments, you'll get these wherever you have pan saving its messages. Tell it to save attachments only, and you'll not have to worry about them. Or, if you are examining pan's cache, don't worry about it, as pan should manage them on its own unless you've deliberately set it up to handle manually, as I have. -- 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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
