Subject: Pine 3.91 Doesn't See New Mail (all of a sudden)

From: [email-masked] (Jon Forrest)
Date: 3 Apr 1996 20:20:25 GMT

I'm running pine 3.91 on a Solaris 2.5 machine. All of a sudden
a whole bunch of users are saying they don't have any mail.
(These are users who always keep their mail in their system mailboxes).

In looking at their system mailbox I see that a lot of their messages
no longer have the "From " header line. If I add a From line then I can
use mailx to look at the mailbox and, except complaints about corrupted
messages, all appears to be well. But, pine still doesn't see any mail.
(The sendmail.cf file has not changed in 4 months).

I don't use pine myself so I don't know what to look for. Any ideas?

-- 
Anything you read here is my opinion and in no way represents the Univ. of Cal.

"I deal with dreamers, and telephone screamers." -- Joni Mitchell

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 15:43:12 -0800 (PST)

Jon,
Pine is fairly picky about the syntax of the "From " message separator.
Suggest taking one from a good inbox and pasting it wherever
they are missing.  Also beware of extraneous newlines...

After repairing the inboxes, you can turn your attention to why they got
trashed.  Is NFS in the picture anywhere?

-teg

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From: Jon Forrest <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 96 16:15:58 -0800

Thanks for the reply.

> Pine is fairly picky about the syntax of the "From " message separator.

You're telling me. It appears that a mailbox that mailx can read
(with complaints about corrupt messages) is completely unreadable by pine.
In fact, these errors are what cause pine to say a mailbox is
empty. As a friendly suggestion I would think that a different
message would be more appropriate, such as "Can't read INBOX due
to corruption at message #X".

> Suggest taking one from a good inbox and pasting it wherever they are
> missing.

Good idea. I did some of that to confirm my diagnosis. What would
be really useful is a tool that took a mailbox with missing
"From " lines and added them based on the contents of the "From:"
line. Of course I can understand why such a tool doesn't exist
since this "shouldn't happen".

> trashed.  Is NFS in the picture anywhere?

This is exactly what worries me. The people experiencing the problem
only read their mail on the machine where the mail is delivered so
I don't think the NFS locking problem is the issue here. Frankly,
I'm stumped. I just don't know what could be removing "From " lines
but not touching any other header or message lines.

Jon

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From: Vladimir Solnicky (Vladimír Solnický) <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 16:04:57 +0200 (METDST)

> since this "shouldn't happen".

One our colleague (who already left this job) wrote a short script that
may fulfill your needs. Name of the author is Jan Havel.

Hope this helps.

V. S.

|  |  Bc. Vladimír Solnický (TeX: Vladim\'{\i}r Solnick\'y)
|  |  Ústav teorie informace a automatizace Akademie věd České republiky
 \/   Pod vodárenskou věží 4, 182 08 Praha 8-Libeň, telefax: (02) 688-4677,
tel. (02) 6605/2212 nebo 2364, elektronická adresa: [email-masked]
Pavučina: http://www.utia.cas.cz/user_data/vs/vs-home-cz.html
#! /bin/sh
# script na prvni pomoc pri corrupt incoming mailboxu
# vyhazi nesmyslne "Forwarded message:" radky a upravi to podoby, jakz takz
# elmem citelne podoby.

# Pouziti:
#   mrecover [soubor]
# prechrotany vstup (bud standard input nebo soubor) jde na std. vystup

# Co se doopravdy deje:
# Radka "Forwarded message:" + jedna nasledujici jsou nahrazeny radkou,
# ktera formalne splnuje syntaxi prvniho radku message, tj. takove to
# From .... (bez dvojtecky)
# generuje se tam:
# From [email-masked] datum
# kde datum je aktualni datum, kdy se to prechrochtava

# Samozrejme, co se pri zmrseni schranky ztratilo, nemuzu si vymyslet...

# Honza Havel  1.3.1994

# Modifications:
#
#  8. 1. 1996 Vláďa	Změněn formát data tak, aby odpovídal formátu řádky
#                       ,From ` podle příslušného RFC (číslo dne musí zabírat
#                       dva znaky, buď dvě číslice nebo mezeru a číslici),
#                       aby byla obnovená složka čitelná i programem pine.
#  8. 1. 1996 Vláďa	Zrušeno nastavení LANG, aby byly názvy dní v týdnu
#                       a měsíců anlicky.
#
#------------------------------------------------------------------------

unset LANG; export LANG

date=`date +"%a %b %2.1d %H:%M %Z %Y"`
/usr/bin/awk '
BEGIN    {
  remove=0;
  }

$0 ~ /^Forwarded message:$/ {
  remove=1;
  next;
  }

{
  if (remove==1)
    {
    printf("From [email-masked] %s\n","'"$date"'");
    remove=0;
    next;
    }
  else
    print
} ' $1

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From: "Mihai T. LAZARESCU" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 18:25:31 +0100

> since this "shouldn't happen".

Have you tried formail?  It is able to do all kind of operations on
headers.  It might help you.  You can find it in procmail package.

Mihai L.
--
Mihai Teodor LAZARESCU               Ph.D. student
  Voice: + 39 (0)11 564 5128      |  Polytechnic of Turin
  Fax  : + 39 (0)11 564 4134      |  Electronics & Communic. Department
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