[ILUG-BOM] Pine - V

[Philip S Tellis]

Making effective use of Pine - V
================================

As the final part of this not so exhaustive tutorial on pine, we will 
cover incoming folders, a feature that can really speed up the processing 
and archiving of email messages.  We will look at them in conjunction with 
procmail, the most common mail filter in use today, and multiple mail 
servers.

Before we start though, we need to know what incoming folders are.  Put 
simply, incoming folders are folders that your mail comes in to; 
automatically.  In a little more technical sense, these are the files that 
a Mail Delivery Agent appends your incoming mails to.  Don't worry if you 
don't know what a mail delivery agent is or does, we'll figure it out 
later.  Your inbox is an incoming folder, and is your default incoming 
folder.  It's probably also your only incoming folder.

For now, let's just enable the incoming folders feature in pine.  In your 
configuration screen, move down to folder preferences, and enable incoming 
folders.  That's it.  Now, we can create folders in our incoming message 
folders collection, and have a delivery agent store messages in there.

Move to the Folder List screen.  I hope you know how to get there by now.  
My guess is that your in your incoming folders collection, with the 
selection over INBOX, and no other folders in that collection.

We'll try and create a folder for a pop3 mailbox (imap is easier).  I'm 
assuming here that you have a pop3 account somewhere, so if you don't, 
you're going to have to imagine this.  If you're working on a unix box, 
then you could set up a local pop3 account for testing.  Don't use the 
account that you are logged in as, because it would just use the same 
mailbox as your default INBOX.  This could cause sharing violations.

Now, add a folder using the A key.  You are asked for the server on which 
your folder is.  If we were using an imap server, we'd just enter the name 
of the server here.  For example, if you have a vsnl.net address, your 
server would be mail.vsnl.net.  Since we have to tell pine that it is a 
pop3 server, we add this to the server name with a slash.  I'm going to 
add my yahoo account, so I'll put in pop.mail.yahoo.com/pop3

I now have to specify the folder in which my mails are stored.  If you use 
imap, then your server will support server folders, but in the case of 
pop3, you have only one folder, and this is your inbox.  Specify the 
folder as inbox.  As a nickname, you can enter anything.  I prefer to call 
it yahoo, so that I know that it's my yahoo mail.  Just make sure the nick 
is unique within your incoming folder collection.

Now, if you select this folder, you are prompted for a username and 
password.  If the login is successful, you see your message index.

If you have other pop3 or imap accounts, add folders for them here.  This 
method of reading your remote mail makes sense only if you want to leave 
it on the remote server always and never keep a local copy.  If you want 
to download all your mail though, there are better methods that use 
programs like fetchmail and procmail.

I won't go into the set up and configuration of fetchmail and procmail.  
That probably deserves a tutorial series of its own.  Over here, we'll
just make a small procmailrc file to sort mails on sender or recipient to
different folders.

First change to your mail directory and create a directory where all your 
incoming folders will be.  This is the physical location of your incoming 
folders.

% cd ~/mail
% mkdir incoming

Create a file called .procmailrc in your home directory, and put the
following into it:

:0:
*To: .*linuxers
mail/incoming/lug

:0:
*From: .*someone.special
mail/incomin/personal

:0:
*From: .*somejerk
mail/incoming/boring


Then, start pine, and create incoming folders for each of the above.  
When prompted for the host, leave the entry blank.  It defaults to a local 
folder.  When asked for the folder name, enter the path to the folder from 
your home directory.  This would be the same as what you put in your 
.procmailrc file.  The first would be mail/incoming/lug, and its nick 
would be lug, I guess.  Similarly, do the other two.

We now wait till we get mails that satisfy these rules.  Let's hope at 
least two of our folders have received something really soon.

Assuming that you've now received some mail in your Inbox, lug folder and 
personal folder, start up pine, and go to your message index.  Start 
reading your messages, press Tab when you finish reading a message.  The 
next new message should automatically open up.  When all messages in your 
inbox have been read, pine will prompt you to read messages in your next 
incoming folder.  Your incoming folders are sorted alphabetically, but 
since you don't have any mail in boring yet (we hope), the first folder it 
will go to is linuxers.

Note: INBOX will always be the first folder, even if you have fodlers that 
start with AA.

Pine will show you the message index of the next incoming folder.  
Similarly, pine will run through all incoming folders that have received 
new mail since you last visited the folder (or started pine, whichever was 
later).  What this means, is that if you visit a folder, but don't read 
any of the mails in there, the folder is still considered seen, and will 
not be visited through Tab cycling.  You can still view it from the folder 
list though.

So far, we've been able to sort our mail using procmail, and view all
mails on a single subject together.  One more feature which helps here, is
the message index sorting.  Pressing $ in the message index allows you to
sort the index in any of 10 sort orders.  I've found, that for discussion 
groups, it's often helpful to sort by thread or ordered subject.

Although we can read all related mail together, we still need to manually 
sort them out for archiving; assuming of course that you archive some 
mails.  I archive my lug mails, as well as those from other discussion 
groups, but not those that I get in my inbox.  It's a pain to have to type 
in the entire archive folder name everytime I want to save a mail.  It 
would have been much nicer if pine could do this for me automatically.  
Well, pine does.

Let's get back to the configuration screen, and add a few incoming archive
folders.  Move down to incoming-archive-folders, and press enter.  Enter 
the name of your incoming folder followed by its archive folder, separated 
by a space.  I have an entry like this for my lug mails:

incoming-archive-folders = lug lug

Notice that I can use the same name for my incoming and archive folders, 
because they are in different collections.

If you need to enter more than one pair, separate pairs by commas.  If you 
already have a list, you can insert a new entry anywhere by pressing enter 
on the item before which you want to insert.  Deletion of individual 
entries is also possible.

Now, everytime you leave an incoming folder, you will be prompted to save
all read, but not deleted messages into the corresponding archive folder.  
You can avoid this prompt, by setting auto-move-read-msgs in Advanced User
Preferences.  You will still be prompted to expunge deleted messages in
your incoming folders.  This can be avoided by setting
expunge-without-confirm.  This flag will only affect incoming folders, and 
you will still be prompted for expunging deleted mails in your other 
folders.  How to do that automatically, is left for you to find out.

This concludes the tutorial series on making effective use of pine.  
There's a lot more that can be done, but it's up to you to experiment with 
all the different configuration options.  Some features can only be set 
through the configuration file .pinerc in your home directory.

The global configuration file is usually /etc/pine.conf.  There's also a
file called /etc/pine.conf.fixed.  This is one of the security features of
pine.  If you run a site where users are not allowed to change certain
options in their pine set ups, then you can put those fixed values in
pine.conf.fixed.  Pine reads configuration files in the order pine.conf,
.pinerc, pine.conf.fixed, with each file overriding settings in the
earlier ones.

Finally, read the man page.


-- 
BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.
		-- Seymour Papert


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