P A N - A Newsreader for GNOME

Old News

June 7, 2001 - 0.9.7 "Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality" Released!

This is is the first stable release in two months, so the full list of improvements is fairly long. However 0.9.7's also been battle-tested by users through five prereleases, so hopefully all these changes won't yield new bugs.

0.9.7 also represents a large effort to clean up Pan's internals for easier maintainence and automated regression testing.

New Features

filter-by-author to the thread toolbar.
When deleting or marking read a crossposted article, the action operates on all the crossposted copies of the article. Thanks to Bob Broughton for requesting this feature.
Added the ability to pause the task manager's queue. Thanks to Phillip Pi, Ron Youvan, Ryan Daniels, and others for requesting this feature.
Added the option to automatically import a .newsrc file on startup and export it on shutdown.
Added menu buttons for removing cached article bodies for selected articles, threads, or an entire group. Thanks to Budman for suggesting this feature.

Updates

Now loads unsubscribed groups only when the "all" group tab is clicked instead of automatically on startup. This lets Pan start faster and use less memory.
Now requires much less memory to decode attachments. Thanks to Wendell Dingus, Aluminum Foil Ball, and many others for suggesting this.
Changed the local article cache to make it likelier that a failed multipart decode will keep the parts it successfully downloaded for a retry. Thanks to Frederik Vanrenterghem and Aluminum Foil Ball for suggesting this change.
Duplicate filenames during saving attachments are now renamed foo_2.gif, foo_3.gif, etc. instead of foo.2.gif, foo.3.gif, for beter sorting. Thanks to Ron Youvan for suggesting this change.
Better handling of thread tracking even when an article in the thread has a corrupt References: header. Thank to Jim Henderson for reporting this problem and Adrian von Bidder for suggesting a solution.
More consistent checking for corrupt article headers from the news server. Sideways thanks to usenetserver.com for providing corrupt headers repeatably so that I could track this down.
Better recovery when importing of missing, corrupt, or completely broken .newsrc files.
Text in an alt.binaries.pictures article is now displayed before the pictures, rather than after them, by request from Margus Ramst and Frank Van Damme.
Now handles FIFO .signature files. Thanks to Daniel Burrows for suggesting this feature.
Updated some icons. Thanks to Paolo Bacchilega for suggesting these changes and providing icons.

Bug Fixes

Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash while decoding some articles.
Fixed crash in the "reply with external mailer" utility. Thanks to Mohit Agarwal and Gareth for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash sometime when posting or when loading the pan.sent folder. Thanks to Pete at gmx.net and Wolfgang Schricker for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when the user tried to send mail without having a mail server defined. Thanks to Cory Hill for reporting this bug.
Now correctly decodes uuencoded multipart posts that have non-uu text (such as checksums or ads added by newsservers) at the end of each post. Thanks to Ken Geis, Gauze, Aluminum Foil Ball, Kim Robinson, and everyone else who reported this.
Handle multiple UU-encoded attachments correctly. Thanks to Huub Reuver for reporting this.
Quoted and original text are now colorized correctly in HTML mode.
Now sends "MODE READER" upon connection to make some INN news servers happier. Thanks to Achim Settelmeier for reporting this bug.
Fixed focus bug in thread view when toggling between zoomed panes. Thanks to Julien Plissonneau Duquene for reporting this bug and supplying a patch.
Resumed mulitpart downloads didn't show their progresses correctly in the progress bar in the bottom of the main window. Thanks to Adam Huffman and Sandor Barany for reporting this bug.
The "open attachments" command now works properly even when there is more than one attachment in the file.
Moving back to the zoomed thread view from the zoomed article view no longer moves the thread view down to the bottom of the list. Thanks very much to Samuel Solon for providing a workaround to this gtk+ bug.
Fixed problem with the list panes looking wrong under dark gtk themes. Lots of people reported this bug, but special thanks go to Duane Healing and Jed Baer for helping track this one down.
Attachements with filenames containing apostrophes are now correctly saved. Thanks to Ron Youvan for reporting this bug.
Selecting all tasks in the task manager and hitting 'move task down' repeatedly would cause Pan to go into a loop until the task manager window was closed. Thanks to Yannick Pollart for reporting this bug.
Is anyone still reading this?
Save-Article-Text will now download the article's body if it hasn't been downloaded already. Thanks to Jacob Christensen for reporting this bug.
Better handling of encoded email addresses. Thanks to hristian Lohmaier for reporting a couple of encoding-related bugs.
Fixed RH problems with the RPM spec files. Thanks to Yosi Markovich for reporting this bug.
Move and Copy articles to a folder acted the same, but Move should have removed the articles from the original group. Thanks to Wolfgang Schricker for reporting this bug.
Small memory leaks and other small bugs fixed.

May 24, 2001 - 0.9.7pre5 "Neddie Seagoon"

If your favorite bug still isn't fixed in this release, then it's probably been lost behind the sofa and you should report it anew at [email protected]. Thanks.

New Features

Added the ability to pause the task manager's queue. Thanks to Phillip Pi, Ron Youvan, Ryan Daniels, and others for requesting this feature.

Bug Fixes

Fixed crash that occurred when activating the "open in new window" feature from the text window's popup menu. Thanks to John LeMay, Ron Youvan, and Margus Ramst for reporting this bug.
Fixed problem with the list panes looking wrong under dark gtk themes. Lots of people reported this bug, but special thanks go to Duane Healing and Jed Baer for helping track this one down.
Fixed problem that caused articles to be incorrectly marked unread. Thanks to Christophe Lambin for first reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that broke the wrapping/filling code when replying to a message. Thanks to Dietmar Staab for reporting this bug.
Move and Copy articles to a folder acted the same, but Move should have removed the articles from the original group. Thanks to Wolfgang Schricker for reporting this bug.
Fixed RH problems with the RPM spec files. Thanks to Yosi Markovich for reporting this bug.
Small memory leaks fixed.

May 17, 2001 - 0.9.7pre4 "Twelve Misty Mountains"

If your favorite bug isn't fixed in this release, then I've forgotten it and you should re-submit it. Thanks.

Updates

Better handling of thread tracking even when an article in the thread has a corrupt References: header. Thank to Jim Henderson for reporting this problem and Adrian von Bidder for suggesting a solution.
Better recovery when importing of missing, corrupt, or completely broken .newsrc files.
More consistent checking for corrupt article headers from the news server. Sideways thanks to usenetserver.com for providing corrupt headers repeatably so that I could track this down.
Text in an alt.binaries.pictures article is now displayed before the picture, rather than after it, by request from Margus Ramst and Frank Van Damme.
Updated some icons. Thanks to Paolo Bacchilega for suggesting these changes and providing icons.

Bug Fixes

One more attempt to get very large articles to decode properly even the user's cache is set to some small size. Thanks to the flood of people reporting this problem against pre2 and pre3.
Fix bug that caused folders to be corrupted or erased in earlier prereleases when the "save setup" button was pressed.
Moving back to the zoomed thread view from the zoomed article view no longer moves the thread view down to the bottom of the list. Thanks *very* much to Samuel Solon for providing a workaround to this gtk+ bug.

May 12, 2001 - Pan 0.9.7pre3 "Rocky and Fumble"

This is a bugfix release to repair a number of serious bugs that were reported and tracked down in pre2.

Updates

Reorganized the filter buttons on the article thread toolbar.

Bug Fixes

Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash sometime when posting or when loading the pan.sent folder. Thanks to Pete at gmx.net and Wolfgang Schricker for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when the user tried to send mail without having a mail server defined. Thanks to Cory Hill for reporting this bug.
Decoding attachments that had no suffixes could cause an unwanted directory to be created in pre1 and pre2. Thanks to Ron Youvan for first reporting this bug.
Adding colorization of quoted text in html mode broke on some color alues because of stupid code. Thanks to Ihar Viarheichy for submitting a patch to fix this.
Yet another fix for making sure that multipart articles will stay around in the cache until all of them are together and ready for decoding. Thanks to Huub Reuver for helping to find this bug.
Fixed crash when trying to import a .newsrc file that existed but couldn't be opened. Thanks to Christopher Huy for reporting this bug.

May 12, 2001 - Pan 0.9.7pre3 "Rocky and Fumble"

This is a bugfix release to repair a number of serious bugs that were reported and tracked down in pre2.

Updates

Reorganized the filter buttons on the article thread toolbar.

Bug Fixes

Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash sometime when posting or when loading the pan.sent folder. Thanks to Pete at gmx.net and Wolfgang Schricker for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when the user tried to send mail without having a mail server defined. Thanks to Cory Hill for reporting this bug.
Decoding attachments that had no suffixes could cause an unwanted directory to be created in pre1 and pre2. Thanks to Ron Youvan for first reporting this bug.
Adding colorization of quoted text in html mode broke on some color alues because of stupid code. Thanks to Ihar Viarheichy for submitting a patch to fix this.
Yet another fix for making sure that multipart articles will stay around in the cache until all of them are together and ready for decoding. Thanks to Huub Reuver for helping to find this bug.
Fixed crash when trying to import a .newsrc file that existed but couldn't be opened. Thanks to Christopher Huy for reporting this bug.

May 7, 2001 - Pan 0.9.7pre2 "Beware of the Leopard"

This is another candidate for a stable 0.9.7 release. It fixes a handful of bugs from 0.9.7pre1, including a serious crashing bug.

Updates

Changed the queue flush priorities to make it likelier that a failed multipart decode will keep the parts it successfully downloaded for a retry. Thanks to Frederik Vanrenterghem and Aluminum Foil Ball for suggesting this change.
Duplicate filenames during saving attachments are now renamed foo_2.gif, foo_3.gif, etc. instead of foo.2.gif, foo.3.gif, for beter sorting. Thanks to Ron Youvan for suggesting this change.

Bug Fixes

pre1 crashed when downloading headers with certain strings.
pre1 didn't handle multiple UU-encoded attachments correctly. Thanks to Huub Reuver for reporting this. Also, added a regression test for this.
The "open attachments" command now works properly even when there is more than one attachment in the file.
Better handling of encoded email addresses. Thanks to Christian Lohmaier for reporting a couple of encoding-related bugs.

May 4, 2001 - Pan 0.9.7-pre1 "Just Good Friends"

Additionally, a lot of Pan's infrastructure has been rewritten to make unit testing feasable. The unit tests are looking good, and feedback from CVS users is positive, but since the diffs from 0.9.6 are larger than usual I'm hedging my bets with a prerelease cycle.

0.9.7 should also have more up-to-date translations than this pre-release.

New Features

Added filtering by author to the thread view toolbar.
Added optional automatic support to import .newsrc files on startup and export them on shutdown.
Added menu options for purging downloaded message bodies for selected articles, threads, or an entire group. Thanks to Budman for suggesting this feature.

Updates

Now loads unsubscribed groups only when the "all" group tab is clicked instead of automatically on startup. This lets Pan start faster and use less memory.
Now requires much less memory to decode attachments. Thanks to Wendell Dingus, Aluminum Foil Ball, and many others for suggesting this.

Bug Fixes

Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash while decoding some articles.
Fixed crash in the "reply with external mailer" utility. Thanks to Mohit Agarwal and Gareth for reporting this bug.
Quoted and original text are now colorized correctly in HTML mode.
Now correctly decodes uuencoded multipart posts that have non-uu text (such as checksums or ads added by newsservers) at the end of each post. Thanks to Ken Geis, Gauze, Aluminum Foil Ball, Kim Robinson, and everyone else who reported this.
When decoding attachments, if an identical filename already exists, then the new copy is renumbered before the file suffix, rather than after: `some_file.2.jpg', rather than `some_file.jpg.2'. Thanks to Paulo Filipe Mira for suggesting this change.
Now sends "MODE READER" upon connection to make some INN news servers happier. Thanks to Achim Settelmeier for reporting this bug.
Fixed focus bug in thread view when toggling between zoomed panes. Thanks to Julien Plissonneau Duquene for reporting this bug and supplying a patch.
Attachements with filenames containing apostrophes are now correctly saved. Thanks to Ron Youvan for reporting this bug.
Selecting all tasks in the task manager and hitting 'move task down' repeatedly would cause Pan to go into a loop until the task manager window was closed. Thanks to Yannick Pollart for reporting this bug.
Save-Article-Text will now download the article's body if it hasn't been downloaded already. Thanks to Jacob Christensen for reporting this bug.
Resumed mulitpart downloads didn't show their progresses correctly in the progress bar in the bottom of the main window. Thanks to Adam Huffman and Sandor Barany for reporting this bug.
Assorted small bug fixes.

Mar 26, 2001 - Pan 0.9.6 "Snufkin's Flag"

If all goes well this version of Pan will be included in Gnome 1.4's "Fifth Toe" set of applications.

New Features

Shift-Delete is now a shortcut to delete all selected articles and replies.
Now if a user has >1 group selected in the grouplist when they try to post a new message, all the groups are added, for crossposting, to Newsgroups: entry field in the message composer. Thanks to Adam Warner for suggesting this.

Updates

The task manager, log viewer, and message composer windows all now remember their sizes each time they're opened. Thanks to Garry Knight for suggesting this.
Pan now lets users choose to reserve a server connection for downloading messages to read. That way you can keep reading comfortably even while new headers or binary attachments are being downloaded. Thanks to Eric Ortega for this suggestion.
The "update article counts" task is more fault-tolerant now. Thanks to Sven Neuhaus for suggesting this.

Bug Fixes

Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when user edited the fonts or some other items in the preferences dialog for the first time. Thanks to Adam Huffman and John LeMay Jr. for reporting this bug.
Fix bug that could corrupt the article header cache files when they were being saved.
Raised gtkhtml requirement to 0.8.3 for the inline images version of Pan. This fixes some i18n font issues and some image rendering problems seen in Pan under gtkhtml 0.8.2.
Fix lockup bug that occurred when the user hit the thread filter buttons repeatedly while loading a group. Thanks to Sven Neuhaus for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when certain multipart binaries were deleted from Pan in the thread view. Thanks to Adam Huffman for reporting this bug.
Fix bug that crashed Pan when the user started a task to download a group of articles, and then deleted some of the articles while the task was running.
Fixed Pan crash that occurred when decoding a multipart article where one of the articles in the group had no body, just headers. Thanks to Gauze for reporting ghis bug.
Fixed error that prevented servers from being saved properly for new users in some circumstances.
Fixed error that corrupted memory and tallies of which articles were read and which were unread.
Small memory leak fixed.
Fixed rate gtk+-1.2.9 build bug. Thanks to Christophe Lambin for reporting this bug.
The message composition window was not resizable under some window managers, such as BlackBox. Thanks to Christophe Lambin, Jed S. Baer, and Jan Schaumann for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that let invalid From: addresses slip by in 0.9.5 posts.
Fixed bug that kept grouplist menu buttons enabled even when no groups were selected.
Problems with line wrapping fixed. Thanks to Adam Warner for reporting this bug.
Fixed problem that caused the last line of an article body to not be shown sometimes during space reading.
Attachments with a ill-chosen directory characters in their filenames caused Pan to create subdirectories with the first half of the filename. Thanks to William Peterson for reporting this bug.
Fixed 0.9.5 bug that caused some people's names to show up as "Unknown" in the author column of the thread tree. Thanks to Felix Tilley for reporting this.
Fixed harmless but annoying bug that caused the thread view to rebuild itself after changing the thread filter and then selecting an item.
Other various fixes.

Mar 12, 2001 - Pan 0.9.5 "Will quality software be written for the hobby market?" Released!

For once we've controlled our feature-adding desires long enough to get out a bugfix release. 0.9.5 fixes about two dozen bugs, large and small. That's not sexy, I know, but what the heck. :)

Updates

Pan is now more tolerant of headers that are missing subjects, dates, and so forth.

Bug Fixes

No longer crashes if the header cache is corrupted. Instead it skip the corrupted headers and logs an error to let the user know what happened.
Fix in parsing the 'begin' line of uuencoded attachments: file permissions preceeded by a '0' (to denote an octal number) are now handled. Thanks to Brian Keefer for reporting this bug.
Accepts articles whose Date: header has no seconds. Some broken software posts articles this way. Thanks to Dave Hill for reporting this problem and submitting a patch.
The Group menu wouldn't appear unless a group was selected. Thanks to Craig Maloney, Lance Simmons, and others for reporting this bug.
Fixed thread bug that corupted memory when two threads purged the article cache at the same time.
Fixed bug that occurred when thread A modified the article filter that was being used in thread B to populate the article tree.
Fix memory corruption bug that occurred when switching groups while an download task was still queued for the first group.
Fix memory corruption bug that occurred when the user deleted articles that in the queue for downloading or decoding.
Flushing the "pan.sendlater" folder didn't move the articles out of the folder after posting, causing them to possibly be reposted accidentally. Thanks to Garry Knight fore reporting this bug.
Fix bug in counting read/unread article totals.
Changing the filter settings in the article toolbar caused the articles to be unsorted as a side-effect. Thanks to Sandor Barany for reporting this bug and Himanshu J. Gohel for suggesting a fix.
New articles were being displayed with a 'new' icon instead of a 'read' icon even if they had been read. Thanks to German Gomez Garcia for reporting this bug.
Fixed bug that crashed Pan when decoding an article with a '%' in its subject. Thanks to rschu for reporting this bug.
Pan now handles port numbers greater than 32768. Thanks to Keith Miller for reporting this bug.
Selecting text "backwards" (back to front) and pressing 'reply' now works. Thanks to A A Arendsen for reporting this bug.
When changing news servers, the titlebar is now updated to show the new server's name. Thanks to Garry Knight for reporting this bug.

Feb 26, 2001 - Pan 0.9.4 "I would have kissed his boo-boo but then I remembered he was a BAD MONKEY so I kicked his face!" Released!

This is release is primarily a bugfix release but has a handful of user interface improvements and a few nice new features as well.

New Features

New icons to show which article bodies are cached locally for better offline reading.
Added clickable URLs to the gtkhtml version of Pan. URLs will be opened with the appropriate application specified in your mime setup.
Added user-configurable date format strings for how dates should be displayed in the thread and article views.
Added option to 'break' a thread when the subject line changes. This is to group separately a subthread that spins off on a different topic.

Updates

The log window has been rewritten and provides more useful information now. Moreover errors are now flagged with an error icon, and an error icon appears in the main window's toolbar to let users know when errors are occurring.
The local article cache is smarter about knowing when to clear out old messages, and making sure that the oldest messages get purged first.
Faster loading mark saving of articles, deleting of articles, marking articles read/unread, and so on.
Text wrapping in the display is now turned off by default for new users.
Pan now accepts messages with unparseable From: headers instead of discarding to them.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a serious memory corruption bug that was introduced in 0.9.3.
Fixed crash that occurred when deleting articles and then reading more articles. Thanks to John LeMay for reporting this bug.
Try to authenticate as soon as we connect to the NNTP server, so that members-only groups will be displayed. Thanks to S�bastien Delestaing and others for reporting this problem.
Runs properly with gtkhtml whether it's configured with GConf or not. Thanks to Thomas Zajic and Joseph Wang for both supplying patches for this.
Setting the font for the HTML window didn't work under some international fonts in 0.9.3.
Fixed bug that kept some articles from being saved to disk. This was also a 0.9.3 bug. Guess that's what we get for going two months between 0.9.2 and 0.9.3, eh.
Pieces were dropping out of the middle of decoded multipart posts if the server dropped connection in the middle of downloading an article. Thanks to Ronny Haryanto for reporting this bug and correctly sussing out the problem, and to Genadz Batsyan for supplying a patch.
Make sure Pan correctly handles those darn 'cut here' messages even in multipart uuencoded posts. Thanks to S�ndor B�r�ny for reporting this bug.
Don't substitute spaces with underscores when saving attachments. Thanks to Jed S. Baer and Aluminum Foil Ball for suggesting this.
Added a patch from James Amundson that keeps the text window from growing too large when there is a long header being displayed.
The Pan main window layouts were not being saved properly between sessions when the user changed the placement of the windows.
Fixed memory corruption problem that occurred when 'download all bodies' was selected from the thread view.
Fails more gracefully when the server refuses connection with a "400 - Server connection limit reached" error message. Thanks to Frank Eisfeld for reporting this bug.
Now handles smtp servers that send out multiline 200 handshake messages. Thanks to Adrian Miranda for reporting this bug.

February 10, 2001 - Pan 0.9.3 "Ape Law" Released!

ChimPanXi

This version should be faster and more reliable than previous versions, and adds some much-requested features:

New Features

Optional inline rendering of images. (requires gtkhtml)
Now has a perfect Good Newskeeping score!
Customizable pane layout.
Added the option to automatically download new headers whenever a group is activated.
Now handles read-only and moderated newsgroups.
Added number of connections / total throughput status in the main window's toolbar.

Updates

Folders are saved in mbox format for portability.
Better reading and decoding of mime attachments.
The local header cache is now saved in smaller files.
Faster network code for downloading articles/groups.
Slightly faster threading, saving, and loading of articles.
Better stability of locally-cached article bodies.
GMime snapshot updated, including some gmime bug fixes.
Better NNTP compliance of user authentication.
Less UI flicker.

Bug Fixes

Crashing bug in applying rules to incoming articles fixed.
Crash during shutdown bug fixed. Thanks to Christophe Lambin for reporting this bug.
Random xlib async reply bugs fixed.
A handful of severe memory corruption bugs fixed.
Bug in specifying email addresses when sending email fixed. Thanks to Jan Schaumann for reporting this bug.
Small memory leaks fixed.
The article body fonts weren't editable in the 0.9.2 preferences dialog. Thanks to Dave Hill for the fix.
The Group menu often had greyed-out items when a group was selected in the group list but hadn't yet been loaded. Thanks to Steven Lusk for reporting this bug.
Pan 0.9.2 gave a warning "message is all quoted text" when forwarding a message via email. Thanks to John LeMay and Ben Elliston for reporting this.
Fixed bug that prevented Pan from dowdnloading headers from groups that had exactly one article in them.
Bug fix in the attribution string: the message-id was being pasted in the date's place. Thanks to Leo Papandreou for reporting this.
Bug fix on queued articles: dequeueing them from the task manager didn't remove the 'queued' icon in the threads view.
Pan didn't work on file systems that didn't accept '<' in in a filename. Thanks to Arjan Drieman for reporting this bug.
The 'external mailer' user preferences option was being misread in 0.9.2. Thanks to Garry Knight for reporting this bug.
Many other small bugfixes.

January 24, 2001 - Pan Name Change

Napster, which owns Pan's old domain, has kindly agreed to redirect to our new-and-improved, politically correct, and owned-by-us domain, pan.rebelbase.com. Thank You!

Everything else about us remains unchanged. Remember: it's spelled C-H-I-M-P-A-N-X-I but it's pronounced "SuperPimpSoft".

December 8, 2000 - New Pan Project Begins!

cancelled

We're also looking for new team members! If you'd like to contribute programming, graphic design, or some other skill to the project, let us know at [email protected].

November 28, 2000 - Napster Cancels Pan

legal loss

efforts

RIAA President Hillary Rosen and Napster CEO Hank Barry spoke in a phone news conference on Monday morning. "We believe that this is another step towards having the music industry work with us rather than against us," said Barry. Rosen said little during the conference, but her presence was telling: The RIAA/Pan lawsuit is currently in its damages phase, and Pan's fate may shave some of those damages from Napster's legal bills.

The Pan development team is currently in limbo. A lot of suits are meeting right now to decide what to do with us. I've heard two rumors: one, that we're going to be tasked to do an official version of Napster for KDE, and two, that we may be sold again, this time to Red Hat(!).

November 25, 2000 - Pan 0.9.2 Released!

Due to some holiday legal holdups the mp3 decoder is still available in this version of Pan.

New Features

Added the option to load groups and articles by a single click instead of the previous double-click. Mouse button 2 can also be used for selection.
Articles posted by the user can now be cancelled and superseded.
Added "Apply rule to subscribed groups" button in the rule tool.
Better viewing and posting of mime-encoded headers.
Highlighted text in the message composer can now be Rot13 encoded. Thanks to Xander D Harkness for suggesting this feature.
Added preferences option to display article dates in local time, rather than UTC. Thanks to Steve Cox for suggesting this feature.
New feature: "Mark entire thread read". Thanks to Jan Schaumann for suggesting this.

Updates

Simpler keyboard shortcuts for frequently-used commands. Thanks to Bas Mevissen for suggesting these.
"Space reading" is working better now. Thanks to Philippe Duperron for suggesting improvements.
A UI gotcha in the Rule Editor was fixed.
The preferences dialog has been reorganized.
The article list loads a little faster.

Bug Fixes

0.9.1's date parser was displaying everything in 1978. Thanks to many people, including Christophe Lambin, Steve Cox, Wendell, Lisa, V Pascal Nelson, Geordie, and many others for reporting this bug. :)
The timezone offset in posted articles was always positive, even when it should have been negative (such as in North America).
Pan was incorrectly marking complete multipart messages as incomplete. Thanks to gpb at seanet com for reporting this bug.
"Catch Up" still wasn't always working properly. Thanks to Aaron Digulla for reporting this bug.
The user preferences of sort order were not being saved in 0.9.1. Thanks to Jonathan Itzhaky for reporting this bug.
"Go to Next Thread" (ctrl-d) now works properly. Thanks to Ilja Booij for reporting this bug.
Sorting in 0.9.1 worked most of the time, but not all of the time. Thanks to Ken Geis (among others) for reporting this bug.
"Read message in new window" works again. Thanks to Steven Ellis for reporting this bug.
Fixed small memory leak in the rule manager module.
The line count column in the article list wasn't resizable, which was a problem for binary groups where the # of lines could be in the 7 digit range. Thanks to Rick Cosby for suggesting this.
The "Path:" date in posted messages was being built incorrectly. Thanks to Rune Kristian Viken for reporting this bug.
GUI freeze when applying changes to the articlelist from the preferences fixed.
GUI freeze on startup bug fixed. Thanks to Christopher Lambin and Robert at freeserve for helping track down these problems.
.newsrc export bug fixed.
Fixed bug in the From: header parsing that didn't always parse old-style email addresses as well as it could. Thanks to robert at freeserve for reporting this bug.

October 20, 2000 - Pan 0.9.1 Released!

This update to 0.9 adds a number of bugfixes, better rule matching, a complete rewrite of the bozo tool, and slightly better memory management and startup time. It should also be of interest to i18n users because a gtk locale bug has been fixed and seventeen translations have been updated. Finally, Pan no longer relies on libunicode, which caused problems for a lot of 0.9.0 users.

New Features

Added "Expand All Threads" and "Collapse All Threads" buttons

Updates

Updated British, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukranian translations.
Complete rewrite of the Bozo filter.
More efficient downloading of article bodies.
Better memory management in the newsrc module.
Rule matching improved.
Slightly faster startup and loading of groups.

Bug Fixes

Many i18n display problems fixed. Thanks to Robert Brady, Kjartan Maraas, and Tov Are Jacobsen for this.
Crash when saving new rules fixed.
Crash from Post window when selecting Message|New fixed.
Crash when following-up an article in certain circumstances fixed. Thanks to Jeroen Bron for reporting this bug.
Crash when adding articles to a group under a strange set of circumstances fixed.
The ``apply rule to incoming articles'' setting was being ignored in Pan 0.9.0, causing all rules to be applied to incoming articles. Thanks to cav and Jim Henderson for reporting this bug.
"Requeue" in the Task Manager no longer lets you requeue tasks that are already running. Thanks to Mark Hinkle for reporting this bug.
Small problem with "Catch Up" fixed.
Small quoted-printable decoding bug fixed. Thanks to Jan Schaumann for reporting this bug.

October 11, 2000 - RIAA Wins Pan Lawsuit

Hillary Rosen, president of the RIAA, was ebullient: ``As with [the lawsuit against] mp3.com, the courts have sided with the music makers -- the dreamers of dreams -- instead of high-tech vultures."

The ruling must come an embarassing blow to Napster, which purchased the free-software startup one week ago. Neither Napster nor SuperPimpSoft had any comment at press time.

One Pan programmer, who refused to be named, hinted that today's release of 0.9 was no accident: "[Judge] Taylor's been hostile to us since day one. We wanted to release one final version with the [mp3] decoder.''

October 10, 2000 - Pan 0.9 Released!

Yes, Pan 0.9 can save binary attachments.

it's going fast

This is the first release of the 0.9 series, and is the first stable version in almost five months. The list of changes is about as thick as a Robert Jordan novel, so go grab a cup of coffee while your T3 line finishes downloading it...

New Features

Pan now automatically adds "X-No-Productlinks: Yes" to new posts so that deja.com won't insert product placements into them.
Importing and Exporting of .newsrc files now supported.
A Rules tool, similar to Gravity's, has been added.
New articles being posted from Pan are now queued up until the user goes online, instead of going online automatically.
Agent-and-Gravity-like keyboard navigation of articles.
Agent-and-Gravity-like "zooming" of panes
Added "mute quoted text" option.
Users can now add custom headers, such as "X-No-Archive: Yes", to a post.
The message composer now has line wrap.
User Folders are now supported for archiving messages. Folders can be created, deleted, and renamed; articles can be copied and moved to folders.
There is also a new "Send Later" feature that won't queue the message for sending until the user tells Pan to. Queued and "Send Later" messages can be revised before being sent.
One can now download an arbitrary number of article headers from a group. Previously, is was one of All, New, or a sample of 150.
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.
Can now Flag articles for downloading bodies in one big batch, similar to Agent's "Mark for Retrieval" feature.
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 uses the Evolution camel library to attempt to decode mime-encoded headers properly.
New feature "Catch Up with Selected Groups"
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

Handles servers with lots of groups better, both in startup time and in memory footprint.
Faster manipulation of articles, including downloading, threading, deleting, and marking read/unread.
The Pan main window can now be resized even when tasks are running.
Smaller 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.
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.
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. After send, a dialog now appears only if an error occurred during sending. Thanks to Jim Henderson for this patch.
The task manager eats fewer CPU cycles on very large task lists.
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

Bug Fixes

Pan running away with 100% of CPU because of database corruption fixed.
Pan now handles reconnecting to the server better after a dropped ppp connection has been re-established.
Memory leaks fixed & 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 , 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.
Delete-articles-in-current-group bug fixed.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Fixed threading bug that sometimes cause Pan to crash when popping up the Save-Attachment-As: dialog.
pan/article-thread.c (thread_articles): fixed bug that could thread multipart articles incorrectly in certain obscure circumstances. Thanks to S�ndor B�r�ny for reporting this bug.

October 4, 2000 - Napster Buys SuperPimpSoft

Legal woes

"Usenet is the mother of all P2P systems," explained Napster poster boy Shawn Fanning in a press conference. "These are our roots. And that URL! Even if we shitcan the newsreader, owning www.superpimp.org is like money in the bank. At least that's what my uncle says."

How will this affect Pan's development path? "We're still discussing that," answered Napster business strategist John Fanning. "Owning the newsreader has certain legal advantages for us in the short term. In the long term, we may have to move parts of Napster into a Usenet-like framework. Owning Pan is strategic for us there."

The SuperPimpSoft Pan team was less sanguine about the development. "We didn't have much choice," said one programmer who asked to not be named. "The RIAA is trying to kill both of us, and Napster has better lawyers."