Subject: Pine, Procmail, and INBOX

From: [email-masked] (Jeffrey S Gostin)
Date: 5 Dec 1995 14:29:19 GMT

Hi! Just a quick question concerning integrating Procmail and Pine. If I have
incoming mail procmail'd into three or four folders <say folder1 through
folder4>, would I tell pine that folder[1-4] were incoming folders? If not,
how would I go about doing it so that pine could tell me which folders have
new mail, and which ones don't?

Thanks, in advance. :-)

				--Jeff

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From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 20:50:37 -0500

> new mail, and which ones don't?

    I had what apparently amounts to the same situation.  Accessing the 
folders, of course, is no problem, as they show up in my local folder 
collection.  I named them IN.this-or-that so that they would appear high 
up in the list of folders.

    However, Pine does not know about what is in them and does not tell
me how many files are in them until I actually open them.  I was able to
obtain a Perl script which I could modify to count the actual messages in
each folder (I commented out the display of names and subjects) and wrote
a front-end shell script to invoke the Perl script for my inbox and all
the incoming mail folders and display a summary count for each named
folder. 

    I can invoke it manually at any time from the shell prompt, and I have
it in my login so that I get the summary whenever I log into my account. 
I can mail the two scripts to whoever has Perl on their system.  (This is
for Unix Pine users only, obviously.  I use C shell, but it should be 
easily adaptable to any other shell.)

Paul
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From: [email-masked] (Dean Pentcheff)
Date: 10 Dec 1995 01:28:39 -0500

Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]> writes:
>obtain a Perl script...

Here's the detailed answer on how to get Pine to recognize those
folders as incoming-mail folders.  I'll assume that the folder is on
the same server as your regular mail (i.e. you aren't wanting to use a
folder IMAPed from another server [which might be very useful, though,
and can be done]).

>From the main Pine menu, go to the "L"ist of folders.

While your cursor is somewhere in the "Incoming Message Folders" area
of the screen, press "A" to Add a folder.

You are asked: "Name of server to contain added folder: " Just press
return.

You are asked: "Name of folder to add " Type in the pathname to the
folder you wish to add, relative to your login directory (not just the
filename within your mail directory).  So, if my mail folder directory
is called "mail" within my home directory, and I wanted to mark the
folder "IN.anemo" as an incoming mail folder, I'd enter "mail/IN.anemo"
(without the quotes, of course).

You are asked: "Nickname for folder "mail/IN.anemo": " Enter a single
word that will appear as the folder name in the "Incoming Message
Folders" list.

Now, when you fire up Pine, you can first go to your standard INBOX
folder.  When that's done, press the <TAB> key, and you'll move to
the next incoming-mail folder that has new mail.  All of your incoming
mail folders will appear at the top of your "L"ist of mail folders.

Nifty, eh?  Coupled with filtering by procmail, this can make going
through the mail far, far easier, particularly if you subscribe to a
number of different mailing lists.  Don't overlook procmail's ability
to filter out all but one of a duplicated message sent to multiple
mailing lists (hence arriving multiple times to your account) -
relieves a lot of annoyance for me.

-Dean
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From: [email-masked] (Dean Pentcheff)
Date: 9 Dec 1995 05:08:59 -0500

[email-masked] (Jeffrey S Gostin) writes:
:Hi! Just a quick question concerning integrating Procmail and Pine. If I have
:incoming mail procmail'd into three or four folders <say folder1 through
:folder4>, would I tell pine that folder[1-4] were incoming folders? 

Yes.  That's the purpose of the incoming folders designation.

-Dean