On Thu, 01 May 2003 01:44:54 -0400
John LeMay
Ugh - did it AGAIN. Sorry for the direct reply.
zentara wrote: Pan is catching up fast, but it still dosn't match Agent.
I was wondering if he had tried Pan, since it's been developed as sort of a "best of" from Agent, slrn, etc.
As to the comparison between Pan and Agent: Up until a few months ago, Pan wouldn't reliably save a message to a directory which you specified. It worked great otherwise. The newest release of Pan is just about at par with Agent. Pan still is a little buggy when you try to save messages, and it's multi-threading gets confusing, it will popup something it just finished downloading in the active window, and it saves everything as a separate message and then seems to use some XML file as a database. It makes it kind of slow. Agent on the other hand, stores it's messages in a real binary database. It's able to search it for keywords is very fast, and easy to use. It is very good about selecting alot of messages and applying the same operation to them. Agent is single threaded though, meaning you need different instances running to access different nntp servers. But for me thats OK, it just seems to work smoother. Pan will use it's multi-threaded design to access different nntp servers all at the same time, so you really don't know where you are at in the download process. Whereas with a single glance, I can tell how far Agent has progresssed doing the download for offline reading. I have a separate Agent and directory for each of the nntp servers I access. It's a small price to pay. Agent has another feature which places it above Pan. You can set it to automatically download all new messages, and limit the the message body size. So I can get all headers, and messages less than 100 lines. Whereas Pan will get all messages regardless of size, which can be a problem in newsgroups where people post big attachments. But if you want to look at photos ( ;-) ) on the newsgroups, Pan wins hands down. I use both, but I rely on Agent. -- use Perl; #powerful programmable prestidigitation