[ILUG-BOM] Tutorial series - Pine part I

[Philip S Tellis]

Making effective use of Pine - I
================================

I decided to start this series with pine, because, along with lynx, it was
one of the first Unix programs that I ever used.  For this, I thank vsnl 
for giving students shell accounts, and not full fledged ppp dial-ins.

During the course of these tutorials, we will learn how to use pine as an 
effective mail and news reader, and hopefully increase productivity as 
well.

Some important things to note though, Pine was developed by the University 
of Washington as a Program for Internet News and Email.  Hence the name.  
Pine could also mean Pine Is Not Elm, but that's a different story 
altogether.  Pine was initially designed for inexperienced users, so if 
you fall in that category, you have no excuse for not using it.  If you're 
an advanced user, pine has features for you too.

One last point before we start using pine.  It is not licenced under the 
GPL.  The licence allows you to see the source, and even to modify it, but 
not to redistribute modified versions of its source.

Now, on with the show.

To start pine, one would normally type pine at the shell prompt:

$ pine

This brings you to the main screen.  The most important thing you need to
know here is, Q is to quit.

Now, read what's on screen.  The menus are self explanatory, use the
cursor keys to move up and down, or just press the access key marked to
the left of each command.  To get back to this screen from almost
anywhere, press M.

At the bottom, we have a complete menu that is always available to us.  
Press O to see some more commands in this list.

Now, lets move on to composing mail.  Most of you would have figured out 
how to compose a mail by now, if you didn't already know it.  We'll jump 
straight to advanced compose options.

Get into compose mode (you've got to figure this out yourself).

While you're in the header section, have a look at the menu at the bottom 
of the compose screen.  Now move down to the body section and see what the 
menu changes too.  In fact, if you look closely, you'll notice the options 
changing for every header field that you're on.

While in header mode, there's one particular entry called `Rich Hdr'.  
The access key for this command is Ctrl+R.  It's actually marked as ^R,
because ^ is the common way of denoting a control character.  We will use
Ctrl+R because we aren't really running short of space.

Press Ctrl+R while in the header of your message.

If you've ever used mail before, you're certain to have received spam.  
Ever notice how your address is not included in the header, but the mail
still gets to you.  Well, you can do something similar through pine,
although we don't want to start spamming.

The Bcc: header, which shows up after you press Ctrl+R lets you do this.  
The format is the same as the To: and Cc: fields.  You can enter a comma
separated list of addresses here, any number of them, and no one will be
any wiser.  None of the addresses included in the Bcc: field show up in
the recipients mail.  In fact, there is no Bcc: field in the received mail
(Some mail clients and servers are broken, and don't always honour this).

We also notice a few other fields called Newsgrps, Fcc and Lcc.  Newsgrps 
is basically a list of newsgroups that you want to post your message to.  
You'd typically not use both a To, and a Newsgrp, although you can.  We 
won't delve into this too much, because chances are, if you're using a 
newsgroup, you don't really need this document.

Fcc and Lcc are slightly confusing, because they aren't part of standard 
mail headers.  They don't show up on received mail.  Actually, they aren't 
even included in the mail you send.  Looking at the default value for Fcc, 
it's easy to figure out that that's how all mails you send end up in your 
sent-mail folder.

Fcc stands for File Carbon Copy, and is the name of a (mail) folder where
sent mail will be saved, *before* it is actually sent.  This is important
to remember, because if pine cannot write the mail to the Fcc folder, it
will not send it.  You could delete the entry in the Fcc: field to not 
save your outgoing mail.  We'll see later how to do this permanently.

Lcc stands for list carbon copy, and is something unique to pine.  It is
similar to the Bcc: field, except that one can enter the name of a
distribution list here.  Pine will expand the addresses in the
distribution list in the Lcc: field, and put the name of the list in the 
To: field.  Each person listed in the Lcc: field receives a copy of the 
mail, but all they see is the name of the list without any of the 
addresses.  We'll see later how to create a distribution list.

The next field is Attchmnt, and is where you specify a list of files that 
you want to attach to your outgoing mail.  You can use Ctrl+T to select 
files from your directory, or type in the file name itself.  Files are 
encoded using Base64 encoding.  We don't really need to know what that is, 
because all mail programs understand it, and will happily decode it for 
you.  What you do need to know, is that base64 encoding will always 
increase your file's size by 133% (in English, that means that the 
attached file will be a third larger than the original file).  If your 
file is plain text, and doesn't have any lines longer than about 72-74 
characters, it might be a good idea to just paste it in the body of the 
mail.  Which is what we talk about next.

Actually, we'll talk about it just after this short note about the
subject.  The subject field is one of the most important fields as far as
the recipient is concerned.  It should tell the recipient as much as
possible about the mail, while still being less than 40-50 characters in
length.  Many people read mail selectively based on the subject
(especially when they receive a large number of mails), so be sure to 
always use a meaningful subject in formal correspondence.

Now, we come down to the body section.  I'm assuming you already know by 
now how to type your mail.  Pasting the contents of a file into the mail 
body is even easier.  Just use Ctrl+R (Yes, the same Ctrl+R, it has a 
different meaning here).  In the body, Ctrl+R stands for Read file, and 
you've got to give it a file name.  You could use Ctrl+T just as in the 
attachment case above to select a file from your directory, and in really 
new versions of pine, you could also paste the contents of another 
message.  I'll leave that for you to figure out.

That's it for this installment.  For now, you should try out the address
book feature from the main menu.  Add all your friends' and family
members' addresses to it.  We'll use it the next time.

Philip

-- 
The clothes have no emperor.
		-- C.A.R. Hoare, commenting on ADA.


Visit my webpage at http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~philip/
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