[ILUG-BOM] Pine - III

[Philip S Tellis]

Making effective use of Pine - III
==================================

In the last issue, we learnt how to use our address books to best effect.  
There's much more that you can do with your address book.  You should 
experiment with the different menu options available in the address book 
screen.  Use Ctrl+G for help on any screen.  Even the help screen.

Just for safety, you'd probably want to back up your address book before 
you fool around with options.  I don't think you'd mess anything up, but 
even so, your address book is stored as two files in your home directory, 
aptly named .addressbook and .addressbook.lu, the latter being an index of 
your address book.

Today, we'll look at the different configuration options, and set some of
them to make the most out of pine.  You'll have to get to the
configuration screen for this.  I think you know how.

The first thing I generally do, is set the default-fcc to a blank value.  
I do this because I don't like to save sent mail.  This is really a 
personal decision, so I'll let you make it.  You could change the value if 
you want.  Alternately, you could set a different sent-mail folder for 
each person that you send mail to.  We saw this in the address book.

We next go down to Composer Preferences.  It makes sense to turn on search
and replace.  This is disabled by default, because it would only confuse 
novice users.  This option changes the behaviour of the Ctrl+W key in 
compose mode from search, to search and replace.  You should probab try a 
search and replace right now, just to see how it works.  I'm not going to 
tell you.

The next option I enable is sigdashes.  Sigdashes are a special character
sequence used to separate the mail from its signature.  The sequence is
"\n-- \n" without the quotes.  For those of you who aren't programmers,
this means the enter key, followed by two dashes, followed by a space, 
followed by the enter key again.  I guess the big question on everybody's 
mind right now is, "Why do we need a fixed sequence for something as 
insignificant as this?  Why can't everyone just decide how to do it on 
their own?".  Valid questions, and here's the valid answer.  Standards are 
good.  By using a standard separator, mail clients can easily separate the 
body from the signature without the user's intervention.

With sigdashes enabled, if you include the original message in your 
replies, pine will automatically strip everything from the sigdashes 
onwards.  The advantage of this, is that your mail doesn't get cluttered 
with everyone else's signatures.  The disadvantage, which should be 
obvious now is, what if one really wants to include the other person's 
signature?  I think that is easily accomplished through copy-paste.

The second thing that sigdashes does, is automatically include the 
sigdashes before your signature in all outgoing mail.  This of course 
happens only if you have a signature.

The next option I enable is quell-dead-letter-on-cancel.  If you've ever 
cancelled a mail, you'll notice that it saves the cancelled mail as a file 
called dead-letter in your home directory.  Often, this file is saved with 
permissions depending on your default umask (don't worry if you don't know 
what that means).  If you have a non-restrictive umask, this could be 
saved with world readable permissions, which means anyone can read mail 
you've cancelled.  Besides, it takes up disk space.  Quelling it means 
that dead.letter won't be saved.  The advantage is that you don't have to 
delete it everytime you quit pine.

Next, we come to Reply Preferences.  The only option that you really want 
to enable is signature-at-bottom.  All this does, is to put your signature 
right at the bottom of the mail, even if you include the original message 
in your reply.  The option after that - strip-from-sigdashes-on-reply 
basically does the first part of enable-sigdashes without doing the 
second.  This only applies if you didn't select enable-sigdashes.

In Sending Preferences, the only option I have is use-sender-not-x-sender.  
This makes your mail more standards compliant, but has little effect on 
anything else.  You'll notice its positive effects only in rare cases, but 
I recommend turning it on anyway.

The next block is where pine really shines above all other mail user 
agents.  Folder preferences along with a few features give you amazing 
power to categorise your mails.

The first two options go hand in hand.  Combined-folder-display affects 
how folders show up in the folder list screen.  By default, only 
collections are shown (eg: incoming folders, mail folders, newsgroups).  
Selecting one of these collections will show you all folders in that 
collection.  If this is what you do everytime, you may want to enable it 
by default.  The previous option, combined-subdirectory-display affects 
how subdirectories in folders are displayed.  By default, they show up in 
a separate screen.  Enabling this feature will allow them to show up in 
the same screen as all your other folders.

The only problem you'll face with these options is that if your folder 
list exceeds one screenful, pine will take a few seconds to format the 
scrolling display.  That's not too much of an issue for most people.

We will also enable expanded-view-of-folders here.  By default, pine will 
only expand one collection at a time.  To have all your collections 
expanded, select this option.  It allows you to see all your folders at a 
single glance.  Finally, to avoid unnecessary clutter, we'll enable 
quell-empty-directories.  This causes empty directorie to be hidden from 
the folder list.  It doesn't delete the directory, but merely hides it 
from view.

The last option I enable here is enable-incoming-folders.  This is sort of 
an advanced option, and I'll deal with it later when we do incoming 
folders.

We probably won't need to change address book settings, except maybe 
setting an expanded-view-of-distribution-lists.  This will show us all 
addresses under the distribution list instead of just the name.  The 
problem here is that it may take ages to actually scroll through your 
entire address book.

In Message Index Preferences, I only have delete-skips-deleted enabled.  
This saves me the time of moving past deleted messages in the index, by 
jumping over a whole group of deleted messages at a time.  When you try 
it, you'll know what I mean.

In viewer preferences, I have almost all options enabled.  Attachments, 
urls, web-hostnames and addresses.  The first allows one to click (or 
press enter) on an attachment, and have that attachment shown in its 
default viewer.  The second does that with urls (even in plain text 
email), and the third with web hostnames.  Pine figures that anything 
starting with "www." is a web hostname, so you could get false hits with 
this.  Addresses is for email addresses, or more correctly, anything with 
an @ in it.  Selecting this item will send mail to the specified address.

Pine by default doesn't handle anything other than email (and news), but 
it lets you specify any kind of viewer that you may want for each mime 
type.  We'll see how to do this later.

I would normally have enabled prefer-plain-text, but due to the 
proliferation of html mail these days, I chose not to.

Most of the remaining commands in pine are advanced, so we'll handle them 
in a later section.  For now, experiment with everything we've done today.  
Try enabling and disabling different features to see how it makes a 
difference.  Read help on each of the features that you've changed.


-- 
Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a
percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.
		-- Edgar R. Fiedler


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