Pan and Scan the News

by Eric Foster-Johnson

April 17, 2002 —

Thousands of newsgroups are distributed worldwide and each group can
have hundreds to thousands of messages daily -- effectively too many to
read. Furthermore, newsgroups, except for the moderated ones,
traditionally fill with spam messages. Unless you are really interested
in Viagra or get rich quick schemes and feel that newsgroups are the
best source for information on these subjects, you want a way to
quickly go through these messages, finding the ones you really do want
to read.

The key to a good newsreading program -- a tool to read items from the
thousands of Internet newsgroups -- lies in its ability to efficiently
help you sort through this mess. Pan is a newsreader that helps you
read the news efficiently. Pan makes itself particularly helpful by
letting you read messages in one newsgroup while downloading a large
file in another. Many times, newsgroup servers are slow, so you can
start an operation in one window, switch to another, and read a long
message while Pan continues working.

I wrote about Pan before, about two years ago. At that time, Pan's
handiness and functionality impressed me. Since that time, the program
has improved markedly. Among its new features, the "leech" mode is
particularly useful as it lets you download a whole set of images, or
other binary content, in one step.

While you can read the news with Netscape or Mozilla, sometimes picking
a tool that specializes in newsreading has advantages. In most cases,
though, it is all a matter of personal style. Newsreaders, like text
editors, function along different styles; which one you consider to be
the best is really just a matter of personal preference. If you're not
satisfied with your current newsreader, Pan is well worth a try.

Pan uses the GNOME desktop libraries, but it runs fine under GNOME,
KDE, and other desktop environments. Download Pan from
http://pan.rebelbase.com and give it a spin.

ITworld