Pineapple News reads and writes nothing but text files, stored in a sizeable directory heirarchy. Therefore, it is well-suited to being managed with the Finder and other standard file-manipulation tools. The goal of this help topic is to give you an idea of what’s possible, and enough information so that you’re working with the program, rather than against it.
By default, the program stores all its messages in /Users/[yourname]/Library/PineappleData and many subfolders, so that’s the location to load up in the Finder.
In almost every folder that can contain messages, you’ll see the ubiquitous cache database, stored in two files: Cache.didx and Cache.ddat. (They are arguably an exception to the rule that the program reads and writes nothing but text files. But the database contents are indeed pure text, including the stuff in the index file.) They contain nothing that can’t be easily recreated, so they are expendable. If you find yourself using the Finder to drag messages into or out of a folder that is cached, you should delete the folder’s cache database. The next time the program is called upon to display that folder, the database will be recreated.
If you prefer, Pineapple News can be instructed to recreate an existing cache database without you having to delete it first. Navigate to the folder in question in the Pineapple News storage view. From the File menu, pick “Folder,” then “Reindex.”
Pineapple News doesn’t have any commands for rearranging storage folders. No problem, the Finder can do it.
First, be sure to exit Pineapple News, because it caches information about storage folders in memory. Navigate to PineappleData/Saved, which is where all storage folders are kept. Rearrange, drag, and drop folders to your heart’s content.
So long as you move only directories and not individual files, there’s no reason to trash cache databases. They will continue to function in their new locations. If you do move an individual file or two, you should delete the cache databases in both the source and target directories.
Strangely enough, there are many account management tasks you can accomplish using nothing but the Finder and a text editor. Naturally, you should exit Pineapple News before attempting any of this, or else it will get very confused.
Renaming an account PineappleData/News/Accounts contains one subfolder for every news account you’ve created in the program. If you rename one of those subfolders, you have also renamed the account.
Your experience with other programs is probably making you reluctant to try this. Many times, programs will cache information such as this in several places, so if you change it in just one place, your data is going to be in trouble. But I am the author, and I can tell you unequivocally that an account name is the name of the account’s folder, period. It is stored in no other place on disk.
Well, there is one other place. You should only do this when you don’t have any messages in Outbox or Drafts. The program stores the account name that will be used to send the message in a custom header. If you change your accounts’ names, the program will be unable to send messages intended for those accounts.
Changing an account’s parameters Navigate to PineappleData/Accounts/[AccountName]/Data, where you should see several text files. One of them is called Account.txt. If you double-click on it, it should open in your preferred text editor. In that file, you’ll find things like the server’s DNS name and your login name. You can change anything in there that you’d like, and it will be reflected in the program the next time it is run. If you want to set a custom port number that Pineapple News should use when contacting your news server, this is the only way to do so. I didn’t add an option to change the port number in the GUI, because it’s an advanced setting that most users wouldn’t understand.
Changing an account’s master list of newsgroups The list of newsgroups that a server carries is stored in the text file PineappleData/News/Accounts/[AccountName]/Data/NewsgroupList.txt. It has one newsgroup name per line. If you wish, you can edit this list directly. You might do so if there are some groups you never want to see again, or if you have trouble downloading the list from your news server for some reason.
Changing newsgroup prefs Newsgroup prefs are stored in a file called Newsgroup.init. As usual, you can change the contents with a text editor, if you’d like.
The program maintains global newsgroups prefs, per-account prefs, and per-group prefs. You can find the global newsgroup prefs file in the folder PineappleData/News/Data. If you’ve set per-account prefs, there will be another such file in PineappleData/News/Accounts/[AccountName]/Data. The prefs file for a particular group is in PineappleData/News/Accounts/[AccountName]/Groups/[newsgroup.name]. If the file for a particular account or group does not exist, that account or group will use the prefs specified at the next higher level.
While the Pineapple News GUI makes it easy for you to assign new prefs for an account or group, it gives you no way to revert to higher-level defaults. You can do it in the Finder, though. Just trash the Newsgroup.init file for the account or group in question, and it will follow the prefs set at the next higher level.
Changing a group’s visited indexes In every newsgroup folder, you’ll find a file called ArticleIndex.txt. It stores the article indexes for the group.
Whenever Pineapple News wants to get new articles from a newsgroup, it must request those articles with index numbers. For example, the news server may return information that says the current range of articles in a group is 4498 to 4563, and the program will recall that it has already requested about half of those articles. Next time, it will want to request a new batch of articles from the index range it has not yet explored. Here’s the contents from a typical article index file:
# low high total
4498 4563 65
# visited indexes
4298 - 4400
In this scenario, the program would request new articles starting with index 4401.
You can fine-tune the program’s view of a group by directly editing this file. For example, you can make it look like the program has already downloaded all articles by making the visited range cover the entire article range. That’s exactly what Pineapple News does itself when it’s called upon to “Catch-up” a group. Or you could “rewind” the group a little bit, by editing the visited index range so that, say, the 100 most recent articles are no longer in the visited range, which means that they’ll get downloaded again during the next transfer cycle.
Subscribing to and unsubscribing from newsgroups If you navigate to PineappleData/Accounts/[AccountName]/Groups, you’ll see that it contains a folder for every newsgroup you’ve subscribed to. All current messages for each group can be found inside those folders. If you want to unsubscribe from one of those groups, all you have to do is put its folder into the trash. The list of subscribed newsgroups is stored nowhere else but as the list of subfolders in the Groups folder. Also, you can subscribe to a group simply by creating an empty subfolder alongside the others with an appropriate name. This is not recommended though, because you might spell it wrong, and there’s no guarantee that the group you added is available on your news server.
PineappleData/Identity This folder contains Identity.init, which stores all your identities. This is also where the program creates the default signature file. If you want to use additional signature files, this would be a good place to store them.
PineappleData/News/Temp When you open an attachment, it will be created in this folder. Some operations briefly put message files in this folder as well. The program will automatically remove anything in this folder that it is more than eight hours old. If you’re in a hurry to free up disk space, you can put this folder in the Mac OS X trash bin. Do so only when Pineapple News is not running. The next time it starts up, this folder will be recreated.
PineappleData/News/Transfer This folder stores message files that have been downloaded but have not yet been moved into the appropriate target folder. Also, if you drag a message file from one folder to another, it may wind up in this folder temporarily. The program will automatically remove unneeded files from this folder, so you should probably leave it alone.
PineappleData/News/Trash When you unsubscribe from a newsgroup or remove an account, the account or group folder is moved into this folder. Later, a background thread will chew its way through this folder’s contents, slowly deleting everything it finds. If you’re in a hurry to free up disk space, you can put this folder in the Mac OS X trash bin, but only if Pineapple News isn’t running. The next time the program starts up, it will recreate this folder.