Subject: Re: your mail

From: Ken Weaverling <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 19:17:11 PDT

Some thoughts on PC Pine...

Many of our faculty work in two person offices with one PC. Others may 
also share PCs, like someone jumping on the secretary's PC.  I won't even 
go into the horrors of thousands of students using PCs all over campus.

With the PC port of Pine, it assumes one user to one computer. The pinerc 
file has info like full name, user name, etc...

Isn't there someway to get this information from the imap server when the 
user logs in to the INBOX? Can't you take the username used and get full
name info somehow by either using the SMTP port to do EXPN commands or
using NIS somehow?

Or, allow me as a sys admin to put a global configuration file somewhere 
and let pine query it for the additional items based on the username used 
to login. I can then store and maintain a copy on a PC file server somewhere.

Another thought, forcing file\path naming (\pine for example) is a drag 
in a school environment. I would rather be able to somehow specify where 
the configuration files and even mail folder is via an environment variable.

I am not sure about the feasibility of some of these suggestions. I just 
thought I'd throw them up for discussion.

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From: Jack Churchill <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1993 10:26:34 +1000 (EST)

> file has info like full name, user name, etc...

I haven't looked into yet but perhaps one way around it for those servers
using IDA-Sendmail is to use the xaliases file to remap the From field to
what the sysadmin wants by way of the hidden_hosts and/or pseudonyms file.

  Jack N. Churchill                         | [email-masked]
  CSIRO  Division of Exploration and Mining | [email-masked]
  PO Box 136  North Ryde  NSW  2113         | Phone:  +61 2 887 8884
  Australia                                 | Fax:    +61 2 887 8921

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 23:49:44 -0700 (PDT)

Ken,
Short term, I can only think of one feature that might help:
  -you can use the -p command line option to specify alternate pinerc files
  -you could then create BAT files to hide this, e.g. joepine.bat 
   marypine.bat, etc.

Not as elegant as you (or we) would like, but a start. Long term, we will
be looking hard at the whole configuration issue. We want to be able to
have personal preferences, addressbook, etc, be stored in one place and
accessible by any version of pine running on any platform.  One
possibility is to use IMAP or its upcoming companion support protocol
(IMSP, from Carnegie Mellon) to access the config data. 

Note that there are really two issues: 1. indicating to the system who
you are (with authentication) and 2. getting the personal config info for
that individual.  Remote file access protocols (e.g. NFS or Netware) are
sometimes used to get at the config files, but we need a light-weight
solution that can be implemented easily on any machine. The
authentication problem ultimately calls for Kerberos, but we haven't had
time to address that yet. 

-teg