Subject: Pine 3.91 ate my mail

From: [email-masked] (Kangaroo Boy)
Date: 4 Dec 1994 22:08:09 GMT

Forgive me is this has been discussed before but I just discovered this 
group.....

Yesterday when I went into pine 3.91 which I've been using flawlessly for 
the last few months my inbox said it contained 0 items rather than the 18 
which have been in it for the past few weeks.  Any idea what happened to 
my mail and is there a way to retrieve it?   I use Pine 3.91 and this has 
happened once before...I'm checking my mail daily.

Helpppppp

kb

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 1994 16:04:10 -0800

I have recently discovered a misfeature in the low-level code of Pine.  

Pine dynamically selects what routines to use for reading your mail based
upon the observed format of your mail.  When you select a folder by its
file name, it will try all possible formats of mail and failing these will
finally fall through to a default "file" format which treats the entire
file as one big message. 

INBOX is handled differently.  Ultimately, INBOX is your mail in
/usr/spool/mail.  This file may be empty, or it may not exist at all.  But
this does not mean that you don't have an INBOX; you *always* have an
INBOX.  It just means that it falls through to a default handler that
waits for an INBOX file to exist with valid mail data.  The "file" format
does not respond to INBOX requests. 

Here lies the misfeature.  If you have a /usr/spool/mail file, but the 
file is not in any valid mail format, it is treated as if the file is 
empty!  This shouldn't cause any loss of data, since the file shouldn't 
ever get rewritten.  However, what the user sees is an apparently empty 
INBOX instead of getting an error message that something is wrong with 
the INBOX.

This problem will be fixed in Pine 3.92.  You should ask your local system
administrators (or some other local expert) to look at your mail file and 
see if there is something wrong with it.  We would appreciate being told 
what forms of invalid format mail files are appearing, so please ask your 
expert to tell us what they found after they fixed your mail file.

-- Mark --

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From: [email-masked] (Rolf Kutz)
Date: 13 Dec 1994 15:29:58 GMT

Kangaroo Boy ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Forgive me is this has been discussed before but I just discovered this 
: group.....
: 
: Yesterday when I went into pine 3.91 which I've been using flawlessly for 
: the last few months my inbox said it contained 0 items rather than the 18 
: which have been in it for the past few weeks.  Any idea what happened to 
: my mail and is there a way to retrieve it?   I use Pine 3.91 and this has 
: happened once before...I'm checking my mail daily.
: 
: Helpppppp
: 
: kb
This happend to me when I postponed a letter. It vanished. The next day 
it was there again and then it vanished forever.
Eddies in the System!
-:(  Rolf