# Syndie help - Message panel

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The message panel is simply the means to read individual messages, view their attachments, explore any included references, and take appropriate action.

The top of the message contains some critical information - on the top left is the author's avatar, name ("foofighter"), and identity hash ("fh6uCZ"). The top right is the targetted forum's avatar, name ("syndie bugs"), and identity hash ("eu61~m"). When an author or forum is not on the user's watched list, their avatar is shown as a red box with an X through it - as is the "syndie bugs" forum in this scenario. If an author is on the user's watched list, their own avatar is shown, but if they don't have one, a green box with a question mark is shown - as is "foofighter" in this scenario.

On the second row there is a set of icons providing information about the message - move your mouse over them to see each of their meanings. After those icons, the message subject is shown ("Possible to ..."), followed by two dates - the date the author said they created this message (August 9th, 2007) and the date the local user received the message (August 10th, 2007). While the date the author said they created the message will almost always be true, there are situations where it will not be.

The message body is fairly self-explanatory - each page in the message is accessible in a tab, as is a tree showing where this message is located in relation to other messages in this thread. For messages that include attachments, each attachment will have its own tab - image attachments include a preview, and all attachments offer a means to save the data to your file system.

Right clicking on any of the pages will bring up the context menu, offering a number of actions and display options.

The right hand buttons offer a means to navigate to other messages. From top to bottom, their meaning is: go to next unread message, go to previous unread message, go to next message in the thread (or the beginning of the next thread), go to previous message in the thread (or the end of the previous thread), go to next message in the thread, go to previous message in the thread, go to the beginning of the next thread, go to the beginning of the previous thread, and jump back to the Thread tree panel this message was opened from.

The bottom buttons offer the most common actions - reply to forum brings up a Message editor panel as a reply to the current message, targetting the message's forum (this option is only available if the user is allowed to reply to the message). Reply to author brings up a Message editor panel as a reply to the current message, targetting the message's author. Reply to admins brings up a Message editor panel as a reply to the current message, targetting the administrators of the message's forum (only the administrators will be able to read the reply). Finally, Mark as read marks the message as read.