Subject: Pine mysteriously quit working?

From: [email-masked] (Ray Atnip)
Date: 14 Jun 1995 14:01:44 GMT

I have been using Pine 3.89 for 6 months with Linux to read mail
which is retreived from my internet provider via pop which puts
the retrieved mail in /usr/spool/mail/ray. On June 1 when I went
to read my mail pine asked if I want to save copies of my sent and
readmsgs which I responded with a yes. After saving these files
pine informed me that /usr/spool/mail/ray was not a valid mailbox
folder. (I haven't changed anything it worked fine the day B4).
I checked file permissions, etc and could find nothing wrong.

I then got a copy of 3.91 and installed it. It doesn't tell me that
/usr/spool/mail/ray is an invalid folder but always shows that I
have 1 unread message which turns out to be ALL of my mail. i.e.
If I have 10 unread messages they are all in this one message.
When I read my mail with elm, it sees the ten messages.

Anyone have any ideas what's happened to cause this anomoly?

Thanks in advance...

--

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Ray Atnip       |        Got a Caribean soul I can barely control
[email-masked] |        and some Texas hidden here in my heart.
                |                                 J. Buffett
-----------------------------------------------------------------

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 14:36:02 -0700 (PDT)

Something has happened to corrupt your INBOX to make Pine think that it is
not a mail folder.  Something as simple as a newline before the first
message can throw Pine off....

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: raya@denali (Ray Atnip)
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 22:48:24 -0500 (CDT)

> message can throw Pine off....
David,
Thanks for responding. My INBOX appears to be a pointer to my mail file which
is /usr/spool/mail/raya. I have completely removed the file and let pine create
a new one for me. With 3.91 pine always shows only one message waiting but if 
I use elm to read the same file, elm sees all the messages i.e. 22 messages
and each on a seprate line. Right now there are 22 messages in my mail file and
when pine is started and I open INBOX folder I see:

 PINE 3.91    FOLDER INDEX        Folder: INBOX(READONLY) Message 1 of 1 NEW
 N 1   Jun 16 [email-masked]      (118K) /usr/spool/mail/raya

Pine has worked great and I really love it as a mail reader but this happened
suddenly when I executed pine on June 1 and as far as I know I've made no
changes in the mail arena. When I start up my Linux (1.2.9) and login in with
my user id, 'pop' is started which will connect to my ISP and retreieve any
mail on the ISP machine and deposit it in /usr/spool/mail/raya. I've been
doing it this way since mid Jan. 

The three things that really stand out to me are that:
1) It sees all my mail as one mail message
2) The one mail message is from me ([email-masked])
3) The INBOX is opened as READONLY

permissions on my mail file is:

-rw-------   1 raya     system     115632 Jun 16 22:15 /usr/spool/mail/raya

I've tried chmod 660 with group being system and mail but this made no diff-
erence. And like I stated earlier, I rm'd the file and then executed elm to
create the file for me but this has made no difference either.

Could the header format from my ISP changed? I've verified that there is no
blank line in the beginning of my mail file.

I just did a find / -name INBOX and there is nothing on my system named that.
I assumed that INBOX is an internal variable which is set equal to the mail
file you want to read. 

I think tonite I will install pine from scratch creating a new Mail directory
in my home directory and follow the installation instructions.

If you can shed further lite on this I would appreciate it, I also cc'd
pine-info on this.

Again thanks for your help.

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From: "David L. Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jun 1995 12:16:43 -0700 (PDT)

On Fri, 16 Jun 1995, Ray Atnip wrote:

> Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 22:48:24 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Ray Atnip <raya@denali>
> To: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Pine mysteriously quit working?
> 
> > 
> > 

That means that Pine is opening it as a flat text file, which is always
READONLY with the curent drivers.  It is possible that something from your
ISP is causing a problem.  At this point I would have to see an example of
your /usr/spool/mail/raya file to identify the problem.  One thing you could
check is to make sure that the "From " line is getting written in the correct
format, particularly the date field, which is a fixed format.  Compare it
with another folder that Pine can read... 

-- 
David L. Miller       /|\  Not everything that can be counted counts;
[email-masked] < + > and not everything counts that can be 
                      \|/  counted.  -- A. Einstein

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jun 1995 13:48:23 -0700

There are two known causes of this problem.  I think that (2) is the one
that is biting you, since you've been using this for several months.  Both
of these have to do with the internal "From " headers.

(1) some locally-written programs that deliver mail write the day as a
    variable-length field, when it is really fixed, e.g. "Jun 1" instead
    of "Jun  1".

(2) a popular fetch-via-POP perl script has a typo in it that will cause
    it to write "June" instead of "Jun" in the header.  This has caused a
    number of unpleasant surprises to people who use it this month.

Basically, the solution is to find the problem and fix it.  For (2), it's
a matter of changing "June" to "Jun" in the script.  All the other months
are in their correct 3-letter forms.

> doing it this way since mid Jan.

-- Mark --

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.