Hail Duncan! Long time no read. But your post is typical of you:
eminently readable, lucidly organized, and full of useful detail.
(Yes, that's my professional opinion as a literary scholar.) Thank you, as
always, profusely!
On Tue, 26 May 2026 05:59:02 -0000 (UTC), Duncan wrote:
> 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.
Praise be to Pan and its developers, as usual!
> 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.
You just gave me a nice piece of news (no pun intended). I didn't
know (though I should've guessed) that pan could append a sig file. Where
do I tell it to?
> 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.
Minor personalium: my head is so full of details of philology that
I can hardly find room for more. But visual a/o spatial memory seems less
crowded.I use the command line as much as I can, for instance, but often
have to resort to the GUI.
> 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).
Another nugget! How do I configure the cache?
> (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 messages, 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...)
I neither run any computer for a living, nor ever have; so
methinks I don't need that much precision. But there must be others here
who're already glad to've read about it. Thanks again!
--
Beartooth Staffwright, Not Quite Clueless Linux Power User
I have precious (very precious) little idea where up is.
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