Beartooth via Pan-users posted on Sun, 24 May 2026 19:00:40 -0000 (UTC) as excerpted:
> Very Dumb Question: When I discover an especially interesting post in > some group, is there a command to forward it, say to my own email? Yes forwarding is possible, even (relatively) easy, but it's semi-manual and to the non-technical probably isn't entirely intuitive. See the paragraph between the vvv and ^^^ below for the direct/short answer if the rest is TL;DR. The key is to realize that in the "headers area" at the top of every post, whether that's a new post "to newsgroup", a followup to the newsgroup, or a "Reply to author in email", there are actually *TWO* separate "address" fields, both editable -- you don't *have* to take what pan puts in either one by default. The first of these, "Newsgroups", takes a list of newsgroups, at least one of which should exist on the news server that's in your chosen posting profile or the message will likely be rejected by the server. (And of course, listing/xposting to too many groups is a violation of netiquette that pan as a GNKSA-honoring client will warn about...) The second of these, "Mail To" takes a list of email addresses, by default empty if it's a new post or reply to the newsgroup, by default containing the address of the author of the post you're replying to if you are replying to author. As implied above, *both* of these fields are editable, and *either* can be entirely empty (tho I've never actually tried posting with both blank as that's a bit pointless, so I don't know if pan throws an error if both are empty or just sends it nowhere but presumably to the sent folder). vvv Thus the direct answer vvv So to "reply" or "forward" to some other email address, it doesn't really matter whether you use the followup button or the reply to author button. Whichever you use, simply fill in the address you want in the Mail To -- yours if you're forwarding to yourself -- deleting any other content in that line and in the Newsgroups line unless of course the intent is to reply to them as well, and pan will act accordingly. ^^^ The direct answer ^^^ Do note, however, that pan doesn't actually email anything itself -- pan only directly sends to news. Instead, pan hands off email (regardless of what address is in the Mail To line) to the configured email client, so you must have pan configured appropriately for that (see pan preferences, applications tab). That works, but if you have both pan and your email client configured to add a signature, for instance, you can end up with both signatures unless you delete one or the other. That's the basics. There are of course a few variants on the theme. One I realized right away here, is that once the message was in my email client, if I was only mailing it to myself, I didn't actually have to *send* it to the mail server only to have it come back to me. (FWIW I'm configured for POP3 email so local storage, not IMAP, which is server- based.) Instead, once it was in the email client I could save it directly to the folder I wanted it in, avoiding having the mail server process it at all. Of course if I was forwarding it to other people too I had to send it to the mail server to do so. There is also another entirely separate way to do it as well, which works better if you actually want to forward the entire newsgroup post including headers (say for an abuse report, where they want the entire post including the headers to better track the original sender). In that case, use pan's save article functionality, in the dialog, select save text, tell it where to put the file, and then in your email client add that file as an attachment to the mail (abuse report or whatever) you are sending. And of course that brings up the possibility of simply saving the text file somewhere you can remember on your filesystem instead of doing the email thing at all. But I understand that for some people saving it in email may make it easier to find again than saving it to the filesystem (and I even do that myself, or at least have done so in the past)... YMMV as they say. Or... entirely in pan, just act as if you're followingup/replying and then save it to drafts instead of actually sending. That effectively stores it locally and should prevent pan clearing it from cache as it normally eventually would if it's left in the newsgroup (unless like me you have a text-only pan instance with a multi-gig cache that's way bigger than the size of the messages you have saved, and have expiry turned off). (For more advanced users, an even stricter alternative to save as text is to dig the file out of pan's cache where it saves it using the escaped message-id, thus getting it /exactly/ as pan got it without processing, but that's quite a bit more work and AFAIK the save article, text, option, does pretty much the same thing except that you tell it where to put its saved copy instead of having to dig it out of cache. Caveat being I've not actually checked source or diffed saved vs. in-cache to be absolutely *SURE* pan doesn't modify the saved text copy AT ALL compared to the cached copy. FWIW it's been quite some time since I bothered emailing abuse for email messsages, and honestly may have never done so for news messages, so were I to do so I'd probably diff the saved vs. cached copies to be absolutely sure they were the same the first couple times...) -- 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 [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
