Subject: probs reading MH folder (and can I write in MH format? (+more??))

From: [email-masked] (Mumit Khan)
Date: 28 Aug 1994 16:35:17 GMT

Pine team,
Congratulations on a job well done (and for a release within a week of 
projected date! -- must be new record for free software). Now that I'm
done with the praise bit, here come the peeves :-) 

[btw, the new-users love 3.90 even more than 3.89, esp with the great new
setup config screen]

One of my major motivation for checking out Pine was it's ability to read
MH folders via IMAPD, bug I've been getting some weird results. 

Platform: (all using pre-compiled binaries from ftp.cac....)
    client: Pine 3.90 SPARC 10/41 SunOS4.1.3
    IMAP server: IMAP 3.4 SPARC LX Solaris2.2 (running under inetd)
    MH version: 6.8 #4
    
Problem:
    When I `go-to-folder' using {mailhome}#mh/archive/simulation (which 
    happens to have 1441 articles (I use qt to index articles, so I never 
    bothered to sub-folder these archives), I get the same article/msg 
    repeated many many times; eg., the 1st 50 message I get are really 
    repeats of msg #1, 2nd 50 messages repeats of msg#2, etc.

    Am I the only one seeing this? I'll experiment some more today with
    smaller folders to see if it's the size of the folders.

Q1. MH Folder view:
    Can I configure Pine client to see ALL my MH folders (sort of like
    Xmh) without having to manually specify each of my hundreds of
    folders in .pinerc?

Q2. Writing MH folders:
    Can I save messages to my mailhome via IMAPD in MH format? (it
    probably already works -- after my MH folder reading problem, I just
    didn't dare try this)

Q3. PC-Pine setup:
    Here we use a PC Mail program bundled with DEC PATHWORKS that uses
    MH on our DEC/Ultrix server, which has a very useful opening dialog
    asking for HOST/USER/PASSWORD right up front (great for student labs
    and shared machines). Any way of setting up PC-Pine so that when
    it starts up, it'l do something similar?

thanks in advance
mumit 

%-----------------------------------------------------------------%
Mumit Khan				[email-masked]
Center for X-ray Lithography		Tel: 608-877-2418/2400
University of Wisconsin-Madison 	FAX: 608-877-2401
%-----------------------------------------------------------------%

---

From: [email-masked] (Christophe B Ruebeck)
Date: 28 Aug 1994 17:15:57 -0400

I'm a new PINE user and more accustomed to VMS MAIL.  So I'm used to typing

	Mail> send filename

when I wnat to send some text file.  How can I do this in PINE?  I've got 
a posting that I saved, and now want to include it in my message text.

Thanks for the help
			- Chris

---

From: Virtual Dave <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 1994 18:50:10 -0400 (EDT)

1. The ability to "pop" to top and bottom of message in compose, read and 
pico?

also

2. Is there a new version of IMAPD?

3. Are there any feature differences in Pico?

...........................................................
: "Virtual" Dave Lankes           [email-masked] :
: AskERIC Researcher "This is not your father's Internet" :
: School of Information Studies       Syracuse University : 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

---

From: [email-masked] (Mumit Khan)
Date: 28 Aug 1994 23:48:32 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>1. The ability to "pop" to top and bottom of message in compose, read and 

^W (whereis) ==> ^Y (top) && ^V (bottom). Was this feature in 3.89 as well?

>2. Is there a new version of IMAPD?

Yes; the pine-3.90 dist now has imap-3.4.

mumit

---

From: Xander Jansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 1994 09:56:29 GMT

Hi,

Mumit Khan ([email-masked]) wrote:

: One of my major motivation for checking out Pine was it's ability to read
: MH folders via IMAPD, bug I've been getting some weird results. 

The same reason for me to spend the weekend on installing Pine ;-)

: Platform: (all using pre-compiled binaries from ftp.cac....)
:     client: Pine 3.90 SPARC 10/41 SunOS4.1.3
:     IMAP server: IMAP 3.4 SPARC LX Solaris2.2 (running under inetd)
:     MH version: 6.8 #4

client: Pine 3.90 on a SparcServer with SunOS 4.1.3_U1
IMAP: same (but another machine) under inetd and tcp-wrapper
MH-version: 6.8.3 #2
all binaries compiled here (whithout any modifications this time)

: Problem:
:     When I `go-to-folder' using {mailhome}#mh/archive/simulation (which 
:     happens to have 1441 articles (I use qt to index articles, so I never 
:     bothered to sub-folder these archives), I get the same article/msg 
:     repeated many many times; eg., the 1st 50 message I get are really 
:     repeats of msg #1, 2nd 50 messages repeats of msg#2, etc.

:     Am I the only one seeing this? I'll experiment some more today with
:     smaller folders to see if it's the size of the folders.

The largest folder I have contains 8886 messages and all the messages
seem to be there (I didn't count them however). Note that I accessed
them locally (not via Imap) with #mh/foldername. 

: Q1. MH Folder view:
:     Can I configure Pine client to see ALL my MH folders (sort of like
:     Xmh) without having to manually specify each of my hundreds of
:     folders in .pinerc?

Try this (prepend {imap-hostname} where necessary) in your .pinerc:

inbox-path=#mh/inbox
incoming-folders="listmail" #mh/newlist
folder-collections=Mail #mh/[],
	Archive #mh/archive/[],
        SubArchive #mh/subarchive/[]

The first one is your normal inbox, the second one (incoming-folders)
are other folders where new mail is deliverd (eg listmail). The
folder-collections are the important thing:

#mh/[] gives you ALL first level MH-folders. Sub-folders are ignored
by the MH-driver in Pine/IMAP but can be added as a new
folder-collection, for example #mh/archive/[] for all folders under the
first level MH-folder archive.  Sub-sub-folders are also an 
other folder-collection. Note that the first collection in
folder-collections is the collection where messages are saved (in the
correct style, see next question). So instead of defining ALL MH
folders you just add folder-collections according to the
sub(sub)folders you have.

: Q2. Writing MH folders:
:     Can I save messages to my mailhome via IMAPD in MH format? (it
:     probably already works -- after my MH folder reading problem, I just
:     didn't dare try this)

Yes, did it quite a few times now. The only problem sofar was that
Pine/IMAP seems to have a problem with creating a folder for postponed
or fcc messages if that folder doesn't exist yet. Creating folders
from the folder-list works. Deleting folders fails, I think because
the standard .mh-sequences file isn't removed by the MH-driver so a
rmdir of the folder gracefully fails.

One other minor glitch is Pine's handling of a drafts folder. I've
configured MH to use a folder drafts to store all draft messages. When
I tell Pine to use this folder (#mh/drafts) for postponed messages I
can store postponed messages fine. But even when the drafts folder is
empty Pine asks me whether I want to use a postponed message for new
compositions. The mere existence of the MH-folder seems to let Pine
believe that there are postponed messages even if the folder is empty ;-(

But from what I've seen now Pine 3.90 makes a good candidate as yet
another mailreader in our office (with a basic rule: mail is stored on
a central machine in MH-style folders, how you read them is up to you).

Q3 is for others to answer ;-)

Regards,

Xander Jansen
SURFnet bv

---

From: [email-masked] (Christophe B Ruebeck)
Date: 30 Aug 1994 15:16:33 -0400

I'm more accustomed to VMS MAIL.  So I'm used to typing

	send filename

when I want to include a pre-typed text file in a message.  How can I do 
this in PINE?  I've got a posting that I saved, and now want to include it 
in my mail message text.

Thanks for the help
			- Chris

---

From: [email-masked] (Gunther Anderson)
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 1994 23:03:48 GMT

Christophe B Ruebeck ([email-masked]) wrote:
: I'm a new PINE user and more accustomed to VMS MAIL.  So I'm used to typing

: 	Mail> send filename

: when I wnat to send some text file.  How can I do this in PINE?  I've got 
: a posting that I saved, and now want to include it in my message text.

While in the Pine Composer, type ^R.  (You can see ^R on the bottom as 
"Read File").  This will prompt you to enter the file name, or you can 
hit ^T to bring up a file list.  Not so hard, actually, and quite a nice 
facility.

Gunther Anderson

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 1994 14:42:19 -0700 (PDT)

I have determined the cause of the problem reading MH folders via imapd 
on Solaris.

The imapd binary for Solaris which we distributed was bad.  This is caused
by a known problem in which a SVR4 program on Solaris can be lunk with the
BSD compatibility libraries without any error being reported.  The
structures returned by readdir() on BSD and Solaris are very similar; the
filenames are offset by two bytes.

It's an environmental problem, based upon your path and evidentally the 
phase of the moon and the blood type of the guy doing the build.  Haven't 
figured it out yet, although we've chased a lot of false clues.

Anyone who builds Pine on Solaris from sources should be aware of this
problem.  You can see whether or not the build was correct by checking the
results of expanding a folder collection; if the first two characters are
missing, the bug has bit.  Be sure to check both local and IMAP access;
this time Pine was fine and imapd was broken. 

Corrected imapd-bin.solaris and imapd-bin.solaris.Z files are now on
ftp.cac.washington.edu.  All the pre-built binaries should run correctly. 

We apologize for the difficulty.

-- Mark --

---

From: Peter Svanberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 1994 11:27:49 +0200

Quoting:  Xander Jansen <[email-masked]>
> rmdir of the folder gracefully fails.

Yes, the .mh-sequences file doesn't seem to be handled,
explaining why (permanent) flags handling doesn't work with MH at
all, right Mark? (At least for me it doesn't.) If this is
correct, I think it should be mentioned in the documentation.

> a central machine in MH-style folders, how you read them is up to you).

(Maybe not a very good candidate, given the above?)
---
Peter Svanberg, NADA, KTH		    Email: [email-masked]
Dept of Num An & CS,
Royal Inst of Tech			    Phone: +46 8 790 71 40
S-100 44  Stockholm, SWEDEN		    Fax:   +46 8 790 09 30

---

From: Xander Jansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 1994 17:48:36 GMT

Peter et al,

> correct, I think it should be mentioned in the documentation.

One other potential problem: if you use xmh also there is a dot-file 
.xmhcache in each MH-directory/folder and various <msg-number>.CKP files. 
>From the mh-driver code I read that the delete-folder action only removes 
,<msg-number> files before actually deleting a folder. 

I like the carefullness in the driver (don't delete the folder if there's 
any file not related to messages there but it should at least remove 
'well-known' MH-capable-client systemfiles (,<msg-number>, .mh_sequences, 
.xmhcache, <msg-number>.CKP).

> (Maybe not a very good candidate, given the above?)

It depends, if one decides to use pine and pine only to read the mail 
(and you let your kind sysadm remove all . , and CKP files once) there's 
no problem. If you decide to use various clients (pine, bare mh, xmh or 
even exmh) then you'll have to deal with the incompatibilities. I agree 
that potential problems should be documented (by the same kind sysadm or 
another volunteer ;-). 

Given bare mh or xmh pine has some major advantages: it's so easy to attach 
a gif-file or other MIME-file to the message and you can even read your 
news without learning yet another interface ! (Note that this is another 
"great job, pine team !"). Bare mh is definitely more flexible but on the 
easy-to-use scale mh doesn't do well....

Regards,

Xander