Subject: Pine and interrupted mail readings

From: Guy Boanas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 1994 14:14:14 +0100 (BST)

Below is a note from a Macintosh Eudora user at our site who I'm trying 
to get interested in Pine.

I'd be grateful if anyone could provide an explanation of what's causing
the problem and what can be done in situations of this type. 

Guy Boanas
[email-masked]

--------------

I had a 'peculiarity' with Eudora (for Macintosh) and PINE this morning.

I have been away on holiday and wanted to use PINE to quickly delete all
'bounces' from MAIL LISTs that I own. When my machine started up, Eudora
was launched as a 'startup' application and began to transfer my unread
MAIL from our main Unix server (around 1300 messages!). I aborted this
transfer with <CMD> period and 'Quit' Eudora. I then left things for a
meeting (two hours) and on returning launched Telnet on the Mac to begn a
Unix session, then ran PINE.

PINE only showed 12 messages in my IN box.

When I reloaded Eudora it still showed around 1300 messages to be transferred.

I then went back to PINE and it showed ZERO messages in my IN box.

Is there some flag that Eudora sets in the mailer on Unix that PINE is
interpreting to indicate that all MAIL has been read and deleted up to that
point?

---

From: "Sherry H. Lake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 1994 10:28:45 -0400 (EDT)

Eudora uses the POP protocol and when it downloads mail it first 
moves all mail from the users mailbox 
(usually /usr/spool/mail/<username> - making the mailbox empty) 
to a "POP" file (usually /usr/spool/mail/.<username>.pop).  If a user in 
the middle of a Eudra download aborts, the mail stays in the "pop" file. 

When the same user logs on to their account after the "abort" and tries
pine, pine looks in the mailbox (/usr/spool/mail/<username>). pine would
only find "new" mail that came in since the download was attempted.  It
wouldn't find the "old" mail because it is now in a different file.  You
can either copy this "pop" file back to the mailbox file, or you can use
pine and when you "GoToFolder" type the full name of the "pop" file
(/usr/spool/mail/.<username>.pop). 

-----
Sherry H. Lake			[email-masked]
Electronic Mail Consultant
George Mason University

---

From: [email-masked] (Julie Jirikowic,HIG366,67108,)
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 18:36:28 GMT

In article [email-masked], [email-masked] (Guy Boanas) writes:
>-------------->

The Pop program moves all of the current mail to a file called something like:

.julie.pop

So when you run Eudora, all of your mail is put into this file.  The file
isn't emptied until all messages are read.

>PINE only showed 12 messages in my IN box.

These must have come after you aborted Eudora.  New mail goes into the regular
mail box, and isn't copied until you read it with Eudora.

>When I reloaded Eudora it still showed around 1300 messages to be transferred.

Once again, the 12 messages were appended to your .pop mail file and
removed from your regular mail box.
>I then went back to PINE and it showed ZERO messages in my IN box.

ditto

>interpreting to indicate that all MAIL has been read and deleted up to that

---
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Julie Jirikowic	        School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology
University of Hawaii    [email-masked]

Acid rain killed the forests.  They appointed a committee to discuss it.
The ozone layer was disappearing.  They said it was a minor problem to be 
dealt with in time.  They confused the power of words over people with the 
power of words over matter--which is nonexistent.   -Marge Piercy