Subject: saving lost postponed messages

From: [email-masked] (Gretchin Lair)
Date: 29 Mar 1996 20:04:00 GMT

i'm running pine 3.91 on a unix osf/1 system. i was writing on a
previously postponed message when my computer seriously froze and i had no
choice but to turn it off.

i was hoping that even if pine hadn't saved the new stuff i had been
writing that seesion, that since it was a previously postponed message,
that it would still be postponed, from the point it had been postponed before.
(boy, does that sound complicated ;) )

however, it's completely disappeared! i am in despair. is there a unix
file somewhere that pine saves dead stuff in that i can retrieve? even
better (and i know this may not fit in this discussion) the shell i was
running when it crashed still shows up when i use "ps" (as does pine)-- is
there _any_ way i can get back into that inactive shell, save the message &
get back out? or is there a way to use "kill" so that, during cleanup, it
saves the postponed message?

pleasepleaseplease help me! it was a big message.

thanks much in advance.

gl.

---

From: kremžská HOŘČICE <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 1996 16:54:17 +0200

> choice but to turn it off.

    The newest Pine, 3.92, has a number of improvements with respect to
saving interrupted messages.  In your case, this Pine will checkpoint the
message you are composing every 200 keystrokes, so if your computer gets
seriously hosed, you can usually recover from the #pico... file.

    Normally a message under composition which somehow gets interrupted is
saved to an interrupted message folder, and then next time you restart
Pine, it will detect that such a message exists and prompt you whether you
want to continue composing the message.  This isn't foolproof, though.

    In spite of the best efforts of the Pine authors, I was in the process
of sending a composition when my 3.92 Pine got stuck (for reasons which
are now clear to me), and because Pine did not expect to get stuck at this
point, there were no checkpointed files and no way for me to recover the
message by normal means.

    What I've learned to do in cases where Pine has frozen on me at points
where I know I will not be able to recover my composition, is to kill the
Pine session with a signal that will cause it to create a core dump file.
Then I analyze this core file to try to recover as much of my composition
as possible.  Sometimes I have had success, and other times it hasn't been
so easy.  This is somewhat a last resort for me, but I've had to do it
more often than I like to think about.

> saves the postponed message?

    Ideally, when your inactive Pine is sent a signal, it will write the
interrupted mail file.  Perhaps someone else will know what signal you can
give this Pine session.  Then you cross your fingers and hope it works.
If you know you can get core dump files, then you can use this technique,
only if you are willing to do a lot of work to recover the message.

    However, the improvements in checkpointing and perhaps better signal
handling (the authors could say definitively) make it worth upgrading to
3.92, the solution to everything but acne....

Barry Bouwsma, <[email-masked]>
Radio Praha Toblerone Tester