P A N - A Newsreader for GNOME

Old News: 0.8 Series

October 3, 2000 - Pan 0.8.1 Beta 6 Released!
This release has a couple of nice new features and a lot of bug fixes, particularly for posting articles.

New Features

Users can now add custom headers, such as "X-No-Archive: Yes", to a post.
The message composer now has line wrap.

Updates

A few small GUI tweaks in the task manager and article display.
The Pan main window can now be resized even when tasks are running.

Bug Fixes

Crash when posting via "Send Now" fixed. Thanks to Jan Schaumann (among many others) for reporting this bug.
Crash in "Send Message Later" fixed.
Fixed a crash that happened when the user responeded to a selected piece of text in an article. Thanks to Jeroen Bron for reporting this bug.
Delete-articles-in-current-group bug fixed.
When posting a new message via "send now", the message is temporarily stored in the pan.sendlater folder. That way if the posting fails, the user still has a handle to the article and can post it later. Thanks to Doug Palmer for suggesting this.
When the "pan.sendlater" folder's contents change, the folder is saved to disk immediately to ensure queued posts never get lost. Thanks to Garry Knight for this suggestion.
Signature delimiters not being added right bug fixed.
Pan was posting an invalid Date: header in timezones that were minutes, instead of hours, offset from UTC (such as +0930 instead of +0900 or +1000). Thanks to Gaelyne Gasson for reporting this bug.
Fixed dumb bug that caused Pan to crash when the user tried to "Save As..." two files with a custom filename. Thanks to J. Casalino for reporting this bug.

September 15, 2000 - Pan 0.8.1 Beta 5 Released!
This is a quickie bugfix release to kill a couple of nasty bugs found in beta 4.

Updates

Slightly better memory management
Slightly smaller group data files.
Tasks that can't be ever succeed (such as trying to download an expired article) now abort at once, instead of waiting and retrying as other tasks do. Thanks to Simon Templar for suggesting this.

Bug Fixes

Lockup when loading new headers for the current group fixed. Thanks to GF (among many, many others ;) for reporting this bug.
Watched/Ignored threads are now properly displayed (or not displayed, as the case may be) when new headers are fetched from the server.
The state for the "Show All Headers in Message Body" option is now saved properly between sessions. Thanks to Jan Schaumann for reporting this bug.

September 11, 2000 - Pan 0.8.1 Beta 4 Released!
This version has a nice pile of bug fixes and a completely new sort-of-Gravity-like rule system, which can be seen in the screenshots page.

It's great to see so many people contributing to Pan: this version's had more than twice the usual feedback, suggestions, patches, bug reports, and CVS users. Thanks to everyone who helped out.

New Features

A Rules tool, similar to Gravity's, has been added.
Can now Flag articles for downloading bodies in one big batch, similar to Agent's "Mark for Retrieval" feature.
Pan now uses the Evolution camel library to attempt to decode mime-encoded headers properly.
Better support for international fonts: users can choose to use gdk_font_load() or gdk_fontset_load() when loading fonts. Apparently some international fonts work better with one or the other. Thanks to X-Chat IRC program for inspiring this workaround.
The ability to delete unwanted groups, saving a good chunk of memory by not having to load groups you'll never read. Thanks to Jacob Ils� Christensen for suggesting this.

Updates

Articles threading speed doubled.
Saving attachments now looks to see if the filename already exists. If it does, the filename is changed slightly so that the original file won't be overwritten.
The Watched/Ignored state of a thread now expires after one month so that the threads.txt file won't keep growing forever.
"Get New Headers" is smarter about keeping any headers it got if the task fails in the middle of a download.
When the user selects a part of a message to reply to, and the signature is in the selection, the signature is no longer trimmed from the reply by Pan. Thanks to Dave Hill for reporting this bug.
A default Reply-To: address can now be specified in the preferences dialog. Thanks to Jan Schaumann for this patch.
The default signature file can now be specified with ~ as the home directory instead of requiring a fully-expanded path. Thanks to Jan Schaumann for submitting this patch.
The new user wizard now asks the user for their mail server's address and port number (and fills in reasonable defaults). Thanks to Jan Schaumann for submitting this patch.
Removed some gccisms so that Pan will build with other compilers, particularly Sun CC version 5.0. Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for submitting this patch.
Pan now builds correctly on OpenBSD. Thanks to Nicholas Ewing Seafort for the patch that made this possible.

Bug Fixes

Fixed CPU spike/Pan lockup when downloading new headers in a group that's already loaded.
A crash that occurred when subthreads were deleted has been fixed. Thanks to Tom Dunlop for reporting this bug.
Crash in save-as dialog fixed.
Small memory leaks fixed.
In 0.8.1 beta 3 the Message-Id for new posts was being generated incorrectly in some circumstances, causing the news server to reject the post with a 441 error message Thanks to Adam Wendt for reporting this bug.
The Message-Id was also sent whether or not the user preferences setting for Pan-generated-message-ids was on or off.
The References header was also being corrupted under certain circumstances. My goodness.
"mark articles as read" and "mark thread as read" now work properly. Thanks to S�ndor B�r�ny for reporting this bug. Oh dear.
Fixed a multipart threading bug introduced in 0.8.1b3. Thanks to Vladimir Berezniker for this fix.
Pan now decodes all attachments in a multi-attachment post, rather than just the first. Thanks to Francesco Lamonica (and many others) for reporting this bug.
Small .newsrc import bug fixed. Thanks to Nicholas Ewing Seafort for reporting this bug.
When posting new articles, default to the currently-selected group. A bug in 0.8.1 beta 3 forced the user to have to type in the group name by hand. Thanks to Adam Bailey for reporting this bug.
New articles are now colored in red again and are correctly recognized by the article filter.
"Save As" in the message composer now saves the draft of the message being composed, without the \n's typically found in dos text files. Thanks to Mark Ovens for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that caused deleted messages to not stay deleted. Thanks to Paul E Johnson for reporting this bug.
The article display's code for wrapping long headers didn't handle long unbroken subjects (hundreds of characters with no spaces, for example), causing Pan to become very very wide when such a subject was shown. Thanks to Tov Are Jacobsen for a patch that fixes this.
Handle unparsable user addresses in the From: line more elegantly when posting messages. Thanks to Adam Bailey for reporting this bug.
Article wrapping/filling no longer wraps/fills user signatures.
"CR" characters are now stripped out when saving an article to a file. Thanks to Dave Hill for reporting this bug.
Fixed a bug with the "save with user-specified filename" feature added in 0.8.1b3 not always saving to the right path.

August 11, 2000 - Good Newskeeping Seal of Approval
Pan's finally gone official with its Good Newskeeping Seal! We scored 100% on the Seal's `must' checklist and 93% on the `should' checklist, making Pan the highest-scoring Unix newsreader.

August 8, 2000 - Pan 0.8.1 Beta 3 Released!
Whoo, it's good to get this released: there's a lot of new code here. We should probably rename this 0.9.0 beta 1 or something. But then again, Pan version numbers aren't supposed to make sense.

New Features

Agent-and-Gravity-like "zooming" of panes
Agent-and-Gravity-like keyboard navigation of articles.
No longer uses libdb for storing the data files. Corrupted libdb files or incompatable versions of libdb in an RPM have been the most-complained-about Pan gotcha.
New articles being posted from Pan are now queued up until the user goes online, instead of going online automatically.
There is also a new "Send Later" feature that won't queue the message for sending until the user tells Pan to. "Send Later" messages can be revised before being sent.
New options to reply by email and followup to group at the same time, as well as to forward a message by e-mail.
Pan now automatically adds "X-No-Productlinks: Yes" to new posts so that deja.com won't insert product placements into them.
User Folders are now supported for archiving messages. Folders can be created, deleted, and renamed; articles can be copied and moved to folders.
Newsgroups can now be renamed to a user-specified alias.
More options in the "mark articles read" feature.
Now handles quoted-text transfer encoding. Thanks to Jan Schaumann for this patch.
New deja/remarq search buttons. Thanks to Jan Schaumann for this patch.

Updates

"Mark-All-Read" sped up again, and is now very fast.
The number of retry attempts a download task makes before failing is now configurable.
The much-complained-about "Message Posted Successfully" dialog has been removed. A dialog now appears only if an error occurred during sending. Thanks to Jim Henderson for this patch.

Bug Fixes

Pan was incorrectly handling groups with only one article. Thanks to Dave Hill for reporting this and submitting a patch.
The unread article count was incorrect in the cases where exactly one article in the group had been read.
Fix bug that could cause email being sent to be refused by the mail server.
Incomplete multipart articles weren't always being grouped right because of the article threading speedup added in 0.8.1 beta 1.
0.8.1 beta 2's "Faster saving of downloaded headers" is still there, but the implementation had a bug that kept old headers from being loaded when downloading new headers for Pan's current group.
If a user was both posting and mailing an article, and one but not both actions failed, the next attempt would still do both actions, resulting in the same message posted or mailed multiple times.
Fixed problem with newsgroup messages being posted with the wrong time due to timezone offset problems. Thanks to Michael for reporting this bug.
Dates were sometimes being shown incorrectly (such as off by one hour) in the article headers window and in the threaded article list.

July 12, 2000 - Napster Buyout Talks

Nothing has been signed yet

Yes, Napster has approached us in buyout talks.
Yes, Napster sees the RIAA/Pan suit as a legal asset. We can't say any more about this.
Yes, Napster's legal team--including David Boies--would work with us on our RIAA suit.
Yes, Pan will keep its GPL license.

The talks will happen in their own sweet time, so please stop asking us about this.

July 12, 2000 - Pan 0.8.1 Beta 2 Released!
This is a bugfix release with some speedups and better database handling thrown in.

Updated

Faster saving of downloaded headers: Pan no longer needs to load locally cached headers for merging with new headers.
We now quote the user's real name, if present, in the From: line.

Bug Fixes

Bug in "File" menu disabling the 'exit' feature Fixed. Thanks to Mike Rylander for reporting this bug.
free-memory-read crash when deleting large groups of articles+replies bug fixed. Thanks to Purify for reporting this bug.
Infinite loop in importing .newsrc files fixed. Thanks to Todd Larason for reporting this bug and contributing a patch.
Fixed threading bug that sometimes cause Pan to crash when popping up the Save-Attachment-As: dialog.
fixed bug that could thread multipart articles incorrectly in rare circumstances. Thanks to S�ndor B�r�ny for reporting this bug.
Fixed "Must Have One Address in From: line" error during posting that sometimes appeared even if there _was_ exactly one address. Thanks to Bas Mevissen for reporting this bug.
Commas inside quoted text in the From: and To: headers of a message/letter being posted/mailed are now handled properly. Thanks to Adam Bailey for reporting this bug.
Don't pop up the `pan changed database formats!' the second time that a new user runs Pan.

June 27, 2000 - Mailing List Update

resubscribe

June 26, 2000 - RIAA Lawsuit Update

third-party library

claim

The strangest moment of the week came when one RIAA lawyer, in a moment of frustration, asked us how we'd feel if someone took Pan and gave it away to millions of users for free. After the Pan team stopped laughing, the Andover lawyers had to explain why we liked the idea so much. There's a Salon article here somewhere. :)

June 26, 2000 - Pan 0.8.1 Beta 1 Released!

New Features

Importing and Exporting of .newsrc files now supported.
Users can now 'catch up' with groups a la Forte Agent
Users can now update the article/new article counts without downloading article headers.
Users can now download an arbitrary number of article headers from a group. Previously, is was one of All, New, or a sample of 150.
Added "Organization" Header to messages being posted.

Updated

Much faster marking of articles as read or unread.
Articles and group changes are now cached for being written to the database, rather than written each time there's a change. This makes Pan more responsive and lessens database traffic.
Article threading sped up by about 25%.
The Task Manager user interface now eats less cycles. This is especially helpful for huge task lists, as the interface would get slower as the list grew longer.
The "Save Attachment As" dialog now lets you choose to add the save task either to the front or the back of the Task queue
Deleting articles is slightly faster.

Bug Fixes

CPU runaway due to corrupted database files bug fixed.
Pan now handles reconnecting to the server better after a dropped ppp connection has been re-established.
Small memory leaks fixed; other memory use reduced.
Multiple selections in the article list handled more gracefully. This fixes a gui lockup bug. Thanks to Kimmo Karlsson for reporting this.
Better sanity checking of email address in the "From" and "Mail To" headers in the compose window. Previously Pan thought addresses like "Charles <@org>" were syntactically valid.
Better sanity checking & warnings when the user tries to post empty messages. Previous versions of Pan thought the attribution line "In article <sf@sd>, Joe wrote:" was new content and therefore didn't issue a warning for empty followups.
The References: header wasn't keeping as many headers as could fit in 998 characters as recommended by the Good Newskeeping Seal of Approval.
Signature files that contain the signature delimiter line ("-- ") were having the signature delimiter line added by pan anyway, resulting in two signature delimiters.
"User-Agent" is now used instead of "X-Newsreader" in the headers of articles posted with Pan. Thanks to Adam Bailey for reporting this.

June 17, 2000 - Pan, RIAA Updates

FAQ

There is still no court date yet for RIAA vs. SuperPimpSoft. Andover's lawyers -- thanks again to Andover for giving us pro bono legal aid -- have renewed negotiations with the RIAA, so there may be a happy ending to this after all.

In other news, it looks like we've hit the Big Time: we're now a blip on the radar of Metallica's Lars Ulrich, who recently said ``...those [people] at Napster, Gnutella, and SuperPimpSoft ought to be in jail.'' Who said Usenet was dead? :)

May 22, 2000 - Pan Themes Patch

large

themes

Themes have been one of the most asked-for features in Pan, so many of you already understand how welcome this is. The rest of you may perk up in interest when you learn that this patch was done by none other than the godfathers of Linux theming: Propaganda's Bowie J. Poag and Enlightenment's Rasterman!

We're not ready to release this yet because we're working out some memory leak issues with the patch. So to whet your appetite, here's a screenshot of the default theme that will ship with the next version of Pan.

May 17, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 Released

The article cache file format changed in 0.8.0 beta 7. If upgrading from 0.8.0 beta 6 or older, remove ~/.pan/data/yourserver/*.db before running this version.

After eight beta releases, this is the first stable release of Pan in three months. An incomplete list of changes since Pan 0.7.6:

New Features

New Task Manager to let users re-prioritize the order in which queued tasks should be executed, remove tasks from the queue, abort running tasks, and re-queue failed tasks.
Online/Offline newsreading is now supported.
Supports wrapping and filling articles to a user-specified column width, both in the article reader and article composer.
Ability to specify on the fly where attachments should be saved (select a group of articles and save to incoming/mp3/artist/title/)
If there is more than one post for a part of a multipart message (such as from a repost), Pan now prompts the user to select which posts to use when decoding the message. This is an optional dialog; by default, Pan will try to figure out which posts to use on its own.
Much better use of system resources, particularly memory.
Much faster decoding of binary attachments.
Added the ability to delete, download, mark read, and mark unread specific subthreads of articles. Previously you could act upon one article or the entire thread.
Ability to "Delete decoded attachment", to remove a decoded file from your $download_dir while inside of Pan.
Better keyboard navigation: now there are menu items and keyboard shortcuts for moving to an article's replies, or to up to the article which the current article is a reply to.
Added "New Articles" to the Article Filter Toolbar
New "Online Settings" preferences dialog
User can now specify how Pan goes online: as needed without asking, only after asking the user, or to quietly stay offline until told otherwise.
Added ability to color the foreground, background and quoted content colors in the article display window.
Tracking of task failures, and automatic retries, added.

Updated

Updated Danish Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish translations.
Decode, Decode As, and Open attachment operations won't re-download articles if they were already successfully saved as files.
"Sample Articles from Group" now samples from the most recent messages, rather than the oldest messages. Thanks to Tov are Jacobsen for suggesting this.
Time to clear out local cache (such as on shutdown) is much faster.
The "From:" line in new posts is now formated "User" instead of just [email protected]

Bug Fixes

Crashing bug when user tried to delete a handful of articles, especially a mix of threads and single-posts, fixed. Thanks to Marvin Pierce for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that crashed pan when a there was no route to the news server. Strangely this bug has been around for ages but has never been reported before now. Thanks to Craig Orsinger for reporting this bug.
The timezone offset in the Date: header for user-posted messages was being calculated incorrectly for people on the + side of GMT. Thanks to Philip Johnson for reporting this bug.
Incorrect parsing of Date: headers with "00" as shorthand for the year 2000 fixed. Thanks to Jeff Shepherd for reporting this bug.
Some news servers would respond to POST commands with a "441 document contains no body, only headers". Thanks to David K. Watson for reporting this bug.
In the same vein, Pan was only sending linefeeds instead of carriage return + linefeed in the body of articles being posted. D'oh! Thanks to John B. Moreno for reporting this bug.
If a Pan session ended in the middle of a multipart-attachment download-before-decode, Pan didn't complete the missing part of the file before decoding.
Fixed memory corruption bug when user saved the Log Viewer's contents to a file.
Fixed problem with getting new groups from Typhoon news servers. Thanks to Alex V Flinsch for reporting this bug.
Fixed problem where the "get new groups from Server" command was always asking for new groups since January 1 1970, rather than the actual last time we asked for groups. Thanks to Alex V Flinsch for reporting this bug.
Decode crash bug fixed.
Hang-after-getting-grouplist fixed. Thanks to Mike Brodbelt for reporting this bug.
Pan was only decoding the first binary attachment to an article rather than all of them. Thanks to Manuel Lucena Lopez for reporting this bug.
Save Attachment was not working for some single part posts.
Many, many, many memory leaks fixed.
"NEWGROUP" NNTP command now drops back to two-digit years if a four-digit-year formatted message fails. Thanks to Paul McGarry for tracking down this bug.
Backwards compatability for servers that don't support the "mode reader" nntp extension. Thanks to Magnus Holmberg for reporting this bug.
Too-long-headers now handled more gracefully in the headers display. Thanks to Bruce Richardson for reporting this bug.
The preferences dialog sometimes crashed or didn't save the changes, particularly news server preferences.
Pan 0.7.6 crashed when a corrupt article header was read.
The "References:" message header in 0.7.6 was misformatted.

May 17, 2000 - RIAA Demands Decoder be Removed from Pan

reported

RIAA

mp3

These negotiations have fallen through. The RIAA's final offer is that they will drop the suit only if we unbundle Pan's attachment decoder from the newsreader. SuperPimpSoft is unwilling to do this: the attachment decoder is seamlessly integrated into Pan and cannot be removed.

It's in defense of the right to innovate on behalf of consumers that SuperPimpSoft has made the painful decision to endure a lawsuit. We simply don't think the RIAA should be involved in product design.

Our decision to stand by our principles would not have been financially possible without the help of Andover, which has generously pledged the support of their lawyers. (These are the same lawyers working with Slashdot on the Slashdot/MS/Kerberos imbroglio.) Thank You!

We'll post court dates as soon as we have them. See you in court!

May 9, 2000 - SuperPimpSoft / RIAA Update

round of financing

RIAA

EFF

We are currently in negotiations with the RIAA to see if this matter can be settled out-of-court. Updates will be posted here on the Pan home page.

May 9, 2000 - Pan 0.8 beta 8 Released
The article cache file format changed in beta 7. If upgrading from beta 6 or older, remove ~/.pan/data/yournewsservername/*.db before running this version.

New Features

Added the ability to delete, download, mark read, and mark unread specific subthreads of articles. Previously you could act upon one article or the entire thread.
New Russian translation

Updated

Updated Finnish, French, Italian translations
Slightly better memory usage.

Bug Fixes

"Get New Headers" and "Get New Headers/Bodies" was broken in beta 7 due to a signed vs. unsigned comparison.
Crashing bug when user tried to delete a handful of articles, especially a mix of threads and single-posts, fixed. Thanks to Marvin Pierce for reporting this bug.
Article counts were being wrongly displayed in the status message "downloading n of N articles".
The "View All Headers in Message Body" works again; this broke in beta 7.
The timezone offset in the Date: header for user-posted messages was being calculated incorrectly for people on the + side of GMT. Thanks to Philip Johnson for reporting this bug.
Incorrect parsing of Date: headers with "00" as shorthand for the year 2000 fixed. Thanks to Jeff Shepherd for reporting this bug.
Pan was crashing when no server was selected, but the user tried to update the group list. Thanks to rpbrown for reporting this bug.
The text window background color now updates correctly when set from the preferences dialog, instead of waiting for Pan to be restarted.
Some news servers would respond to POST commands with a "441 document contains no body, only headers". Thanks to David K. Watson for reporting this bug.
In the same vein, Pan was only sending linefeeds instead of carriage return + linefeed in the body of articles being posted. Big thanks to John B. Moreno for reporting this bug.
If a Pan session ended in the middle of a multipart-attachment download-before-decode, Pan didn't complete the missing part of the file before decoding.
Ebg13 jbexf ntnva. Gunaxf gb Qbhtynf Xvycngevpx sbe ercbegvat guvf oht.

May 1, 2000 - RIAA Sues SuperPimpSoft

mp3.com

RIAA

SuperPimpSoft

Lawyers representing the heavy metal band Metallica are said to be preparing their own suit against SuperPimpSoft, citing a Metallica "flood" that appeared on alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.humor last February. Playboy, Hustler, and the American Software Producers against Piracy commented that they, too, may want to "follow suit."

May 1, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 beta 7 Released
The article cache file format has changed. Remove ~/.pan/data/yournewsservername/*.db before running this version.

New Features

More "real" offline newsreading support, such as single-step downloading of new, all, and samples of article headers and bodies.
Ability to "Delete decoded attachment", to remove a decoded file from your $download_dir while inside of Pan.

Updated

"Sample Articles from Group" now samples from the most recent messages, rather than the oldest messages. Thanks to Tov are Jacobsen for suggesting this.
Decode, Decode As, and Open attachment operations won't re-download articles if they were already successfully saved as files.
"Download Bodies of Selected Thread" can now handle downloading all the articles in multiple threads when multiple threads are selected.
Batch decoding optimizations and speed improvements.
Updated Korean and Spanish translations.

Bug Fixes

Fixed bug that crashed pan when the selection of articles to download included the group name at the top of the article tree. Thanks to Tomas Junnonen for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that crashed pan when a there was no route to the news server. Strangely this bug has been around for ages but has never been reported before now. Thanks to Craig Orsinger for reporting this bug.
Fixed FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE build problem reported by Geoff Roth.
Fixed bug that crashed Pan when new user entered a servername that didn't exist, and then tried download a grouplist from it.
Fixed memory corruption bug when user saved the Log Viewer's contents to a file.
Fixed problem with getting new groups from Typhoon news servers. Thanks to Alex V Flinsch for reporting this bug.
Fixed problem where the "get new groups from Server" command was always asking for new groups since January 1 1970, rather than the actual last time we asked for groups. Thanks to Alex V Flinsch for reporting this bug.
Fixed problem with article window colors/fonts not being set properly on startup, and not being shown properly after they'd been edited. Thanks to Alex V Flinsch reporting this bug.
In previous versions of Pan 0.8.0, failure to get a list of articles from an empty group was reported as an error, which caused Pan to keep retrying the group for articles.
"Crash in save dialog when okay clicked" bug fixed. How had this slipped by for so long, when we're all decoding with Pan? Thanks to Paul "redhotants" for reporting this bug.
Attachments weren't being saved in "auto guess which articles to decode for this multipart" mode if the poster didn't post with a [1/24] or (1/24)-style subject to give Pan a hint how many articles are in the multipart. Now pan goes ahead and tries to decode even when the hint is missing. Thanks to Paul McGarry for reporting this bug.

April 24, 2000
SuperPimpSoft Receives $8.37 in 29th Round of Funding

Matt Deatherage

Builds Shippit

Pan Executive Edition 2000

April 24, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 beta 6 Released

New Features

Much faster decoding of binary attachments.
Better keyboard navigation: now there are menu items and keyboard shortcuts for moving to an article's replies, or to up to the article which the current article is a reply to.

Updated

Updated Finnish, Italian, Korean, Polish, Spanish translations.
Slightly faster downloading and saving of articles.
The usual batch of speed and memory tweaks.

Bug Fixes

Gui lockup bug fixed.
Opening binary attachments with special shell characters no longer causes problems.
Killfile-crashes-Pan fix. Thanks to cyberclay <[email protected]> for reporting this bug.
Fixed a crash that occurred when a binary attachment finished decoding while the user was loading a new newsgroup.
Fixed crash that occurred when "track thread" was selected on a top article in a thread. Thanks to Paul <[email protected]> for reporting this bug.
Problems with article view window's user-specified foreground colors fixed. Thanks to Craig Orsinger <[email protected]> for reporting this bug.
Another article-wrapping bug fixed.
Small memory leak fixed.
Using the killfile to filter out articles crossposted to >N groups didn't work properly.
Better error-checking for corrupt entries in the article header cache database.

April 14, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 beta 5 Released

New Features

Added "New Articles" to the Article Filter Toolbar.
New Online/Offline newsreader settings dialog.
New-and-improved user interface for the the Task Manager.
User can now specify how Pan goes online: as needed without asking, only after asing the user, or to quietly stay offline until told otherwise.
User can now specify what column to wrap/fill articles at.
User can now specify the foreground, background, and quoted colors of the article display window.

Updated

Article loading speed tweaks.
Updated Danish, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, and Spanish translations.

Bug Fixes

Small memory fixes.
Small article filling fix.
Bugfix to the binary decoder's automatic multipart article chooser. Nonbinary replies were sometimes getting mixed in with the binary parts of a multipart message.
Setting group properties for >1 group at a time fixed.
The socket "keepalive" message sent by Pan to the news server has been changed to use less bandwidth.
Compile problems on Solaris fixed.

April 4, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 Beta 4 Released

Bug Fixes

0.8.0 beta 3 has a small bug in that it can't read articles. This seems like an important feature for a newsreader, so we've fixed the bug and upped the version number to avoid confusion.

April 4, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 Beta 3 Released

New Features

Added ability to download selected articles and groups for offline reading
Added better tracking and automatic retries of NNTP task in the Task Manager.
0.8.0 beta 2's multipart selector feature can now be turned off so that Pan picks which articles to use during a decode.

Updated

Speed Improvments.
Updated Italian, Korean, Polish, and Spanish Translations.
The Task Manager now gives estimated time to completion of a task.
Spiffy cleaned-up User Interface
Time to clear out local cache (such as on shutdown) is much faster.

Bug Fixes

Decode crash bug fixed.
Hang-after-getting-grouplist fixed. Thanks to Mike Brodbelt for reporting this bug.
Pan was only decoding the first binary attachment to an article rather than all of them. Thanks to Manuel Lucena Lopez for reporting this bug.
Save Attachment was not working for some single part posts.
Memory leaks fixed.
Task item progress bars work correctly now, even when pulling up the task manager in mid-task.
Crash when running --debug-db fixed.
Small text alignment bug in "Fill/Wrap Article" feature fixed.
"Get All Groups" would erase subscriptions for that group. Thanks to Bruce Richardson for reporting this bug.

March 28, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 Beta 2 Released

New Features

If there is more than one post for a part of a multipart message (such as from a repost), Pan now prompts the user to select which posts to use when decoding the message.

Updated

Faster decoding of binary attachments.
Faster startup.
Faster loading of articles locally and from news servers.

Bug Fixes

Grouplist Filter crash bug fixed. Thanks to Geoffrey de Vlugt and John Krause for reporting this bug.
Pan was crashing when the user tried to follow-up to a new article. Thanks to Matthew Cline for tracking down this bug.
Some pretty large memory leaks fixed.
"Get New Groups" bug fixed.
Grouplist-not-sorting bug fixed.
Fixed potential infinite loop in acache. Thanks to Matthew Cline for the patch.
Fixed infinite loop that occurred in "go to next group with unread messages" when all the groups' messages were read.
Pan was sending bare linefeeds when sending outgoing mail, which is prohibited in 822bis section 2.3.
"NEWGROUP" NNTP command now drops back to two-digit years if a four-digit-year formatted message fails. Thanks to Paul McGarry for tracking down this bug.
Backwards compatability for servers that don't support the "mode reader" NNTP extension. Thanks to Magnus Holmberg for reporting this bug.
The article list's rows weren't adjusting their height properly when the user changed to a different-sized font. Thanks to Kingsley Turner for reporting this bug.
The article filler/wrapper wasn't trimming out \r's as it should have been. Thanks to [email protected] for reporting this bug.
Too-long-headers now handled more gracefully in the headers display. Thanks to Bruce Richardson for reporting this bug.
Small bug in reporting expired articles fixed. Thanks to Reijo Korhonen for spotting this bug.

March 21, 2000 - SuperPimpSoft Joins Amazon Boycott
Following the GNU boycott of Amazon and Tim O'Reilly's open letter to Amazon, SuperPimpSoft has decided to remove its two books -- Happy Newsreading with Pan 0.7.2 by James "Kibo" Parry, and Warez, pr0n, and mp3 Leeching Secrets of the Pan Elite by Stan Kelly-Bootle -- from Amazon's shelves. SuperPimpSoft is in negotiations with other resellers for distribution rights.

March 21, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 Beta 1 Released

New Features

New Task Manager to let users re-prioritize the order in which queued tasks should be executed, remove tasks from the queue, abort running tasks, and re-queue failed tasks.
Online/Offline newsreading is now supported.
Supports "wrapping" messages to the right column width, both in the article reader and message composer.
Ability to specify on the fly where attachments should be saved (ie, select a group of articles and save to ~/incoming/fine-art/escher/)
Added Finnish Translation.

Updated

Faster loading of group and article lists.
Faster startup.
Updated Danish, French, Italian, Norwegian, and Polish translations.
The "From:" line in new posts is now formated "User" <[email protected]> instead of just [email protected]

Bug Fixes

The preferences dialog sometimes crashed or didn't save the changes.
Pan 0.7.6 crashed when a corrupt article header was read.
The "References:" message header in 0.7.6 was misformatted.
"Decode Binary Attachments" bug fixed.
Memory usage tweaks.
Other fixes.