Subject: Re: forcing mail check

From: Trey Harris <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 May 1995 00:37:05 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 3 May 1995, Ian Russell Ollmann wrote:
> Some news programs allow you to set an environemnt variable to tell it 
> which editor to use for news posting / mail sending. Try issuing the 
> following command and then start up your news reader and see what happens:
> 
> setenv EDITOR pico
> 
> It won't quite be pine, but it will at least edit your message like pine 
> does.

Um, yes.  I've been running Unix machines for enough years to know about
the EDITOR variable, at least. :) And if you have a sane newsreader, it
will let you use an alternate editor from the one in the EDITOR
environment variable. But will that save the outgoing mail in my sent-mail
folder?  Even if there's a way to do it, will it use IMAP, as I do with
Pine?  Can I use my Pine address-book nicknames in the Cc: line?  Can I
postpone the message for later?  Can I attatch a MIME-encoded file, if I'm
responding to someone who needs some source code or a binary file that I
have? 

You see what I'm getting at.  It isn't Pico I want, it's *Pine*.  Right 
now, I have my newsreader (trn) set up as an alias, like follows:

alias trn='/usr/local/bin/trn ; pine -f respond-to'

and when I'm using trn, I save any messages I want to respond to in the 
respond-to folder, and when I quit trn, Pine starts up. This works, but 
it's kludgy and it has a number of looming problems, most notably of 
which is what if the respond-to file needs to be an IMAP folder rather 
than a local file?

Trey Harris                              http://sunsite.unc.edu/harris
  System Administrator, Project Isis, Office of Information Technology
                       The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 May 1995 08:38:46 GMT

In <[email-masked]>
[email-masked] (Trey Harris) writes:

>And if you have a sane newsreader, it
>environment variable. But...
>...It isn't [an editor] I want, it's *Pine*. 

If you wish to use a mail agent of your choice to respond by email to
News postings:

Create a tiny program called 'mailme', and a suitable macro for your
news reader that will pipe a News posting through this program.  Here
is the program that I use:

   #! /bin/sh
   # Mail me the input, used from rn or nn to convert articles
   # to mail messages.  Standard input must contain all needed headers.
   # -i tells sendmail to ignore dots in input.  R. Dhesi
   /bin/cat $* | /usr/lib/sendmail -i dhesi

When you wish to send an email response to a News posting, just pipe it
through the 'mailme' command.  This converts it into an incoming email
message.  Later you can invoke your favorite mail agent and reply to
your incoming mail normally.  You can recognize the messages that were
piped into 'mailme' from News because they will contain Path: headers.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>