Subject: remote folder management

From: Gordon Good <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 May 93 13:53:27 -0400

I seem to recall some comment (perhaps in reference to PC-Pine) that
remote folder management is going to be enhanced in future versions of
Pine and PC-Pine.  Here at umich, we're planning to run an IMAP service
for the campus, and have run into some problems with Pine/Mailstrom
incompatibility in remote folder management.  Specifically, while it's
easy to specify that the inbox is a remote IMAP mailbox, we'd like to
be able to, in Pine, specify that all folder management take place on
a remote IMAP server.  This is to prevent users here from creating
folders with Pine, then wondering why they can't access them from
Mailstrom (since the IMAP server and the user's UNIX machines won't be
sharing filesystems).

So, I guess my question is: can someone fill me in on what remote
folder management in Pine is going to look like in future releases?

-Gordon

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 May 1993 13:49:04 -0700 (PDT)

> folder management in Pine is going to look like in future releases?

Gordon,
In a nushell: for both Unix Pine and PC-Pine there will be a notion of
"folder-collections" (and also "news-collections") that are defined in the
.pinerc file.  You can think of those as directories, (though they could
conceivably be a subset of a directory or some set unrelated to a
directory). 

Any folder collection may be local or remote.  Here's an excerpt from 
my .pinerc:

news-collections=News *{news.u/nntp}[*],
        MailNews *{news.u/nntp}[*mail*]

folder-collections=PRIMARY {shivafs.cac.washington.edu}./[*],
        PINE {shivafs.cac.washington.edu}PINE/[*],
        MailDir {shivafs.cac.washington.edu}mail/[*],
        OldNews {shivafs.cac.washington.edu}News/[*],
        Mead {mead.u.washington.edu}mail/[*],
        Phantom {phantom.cac.washington.edu}./[*],
	LAPTOP mail\[*]

In this case, all of the collections except the last one are remote.
Note that the path syntax is whatever is right for the OS storing
the collection, so watch the direction of your slashes when mixing DOS 
and Unix collections.  Many people will have a single collection on
a timesharing host.  Those who use a timesharing host for dialin and
PC-Pine on their desk will typically have at least two.  I find the
Folder Collections paradigm useful for organizing things, so I tend to
have many.

Note also that the MailNews collection is defined to be the subset of 
available folders (newsgroups) that have the string "mail" in their name.

It will also be possible for the default-fcc to be a remote folder.

In order to be able to *append* to an existing remote folder (i.e. Save),
or *create* a new remote folder, you will need a new version of IMAPd,
to be released *soon* with PC-Pine.  Without the extended IMAPd you can 
access remote folders, but not append to or create them.

Regarding PC-Pine and "soon"... I know many of you are patiently waiting 
for it.  Since I have a perfect record of being wrong about every date 
I've offered so far, I'll refrain.  There is a memory leak yet to be tracked 
down and a couple of command name inconsistencies yet to be fixed, but
there is steady progress and the goal grows ever closer.  (Each week we 
halve the distance to the goal... :)

-teg