Subject: Re: PLEASE HELP (basic question)

From: [email-masked] (Randell Pelak)
Date: 16 May 1996 11:20:05 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, murrelld <[email-masked]> wrote:
>Hi.  I'd really appreciate any advice anyone can give me.  I am a newbie, 
>and would like to know how to download Pine folders (e.g. "Sent mail 
>Aug-95" and "INBOX") onto my hard drive.  I know how to download 
>individual files (E for Export, then I use the downloading feature on my 
>service provider's menu), but I am hoping there is a more convenient way 
>to get, say, a folder with 200 messages onto a disk.
>
>My final goal, incidentally, is to have all my sent and received mail in 
>the form of MS Word documents.
>
>If anyone actually has the patience to answer this question, please do so 
>in the simplest terms--any unexplained use of technical language 
>will lose me.  I'm very grateful for any help.
>
>Yours sincerely,
>
>David Murrell
>-- 
>Yours sincerely,
>
>David Murrell

Okay, this is all very simple.  The folder is in fact a file.  And it is a
file of the same name as the folder.  So if your folder is games, the file
name is games.  But it is ina directory.  The directry is probably called
Mail or something like that.  Go into that directory and get the files you
want. 
  As for going to MS-word, after you down load it they should work in
MS-word just fine.  With the fiolder file though all of the mail will be in
one file, it will just be one message after the next, seperating it out
could be fun.  :)

DragonKnight 

Randell Allen Pelak 			[email-masked]
Homepages				http://cernan.ecn.purdue.edu/~pelak
					http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~dagrp

Joke of the time period: 

                     Real programmers don't document.  
       "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand."

---

From: [email-masked] (murrelld)
Date: 15 May 1996 19:55:24 -0400

Yours sincerely,

David Murrell
-- 
Yours sincerely,

David Murrell

---

From: [email-masked] (Steven King [Really!])
Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 12:34:38 GMT

>the form of MS Word documents.

Yup, it's a lot easier.  The folders (except for "INBOX") are stored in a
directory called "mail".  They're just text files that contain all the
messages in that folder.  Pine (and most other mail programs) separate the
messages by looking for a blank line followed by the word "From " with a
trailing space.

So, you should just be able to change to your "mail" directory and use the
standard download commands to get the files.  On my system, this would
work:

    cd mail
    sz sent-mail-aug-1995

You mention "the downloading feature on my service provider's menu", which
implies some sort of non-standard front-end to everything.  If you can't
figure it out in a couple tries, the best thing to do is to talk to your
service provider and ask them how to do the download.  (In fact, that's
not bad advice in general!  Your system administrator is probably a
friendly sort who'd be more than happy to help!)

The "INBOX" folder is a different beast.  It's usually in a separate
directory and named by your userid, something like
"/usr/spool/mail/murrelld".  This is more system dependent.  I don't
really recommend trying to download this unless you're comfortable moving
around a Unix system.  For your purposes it'll probably be easier to use
Pine to save (or copy) specific messages to your own folders and download
them with the instructions I showed above. 

What I described is a pretty standard setup.  Your system may be set up
differently.  If you have problems, please talk to your service provider.
Their the only ones who can tell you exactly how their system is set up.

Now, *why* you'd want your mail as MS-Word documents is your own
problem...

[This message has been sent privately via email and posted to
comp.mail.pine.]

-- 
----------------------------------------<Steven King, [email-masked]>--
"Gee, Brain, whaddaya wanna do tonight?"
"The same thing we do every night, Pinky.  Try to take over the world!"

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 09:46:15 -0400

> the form of MS Word documents.

Other people have answered your download question but I have a
comment about this part.  Did you know that you can use PC Pine
for Windows/Winsock to access your mail folders after you've
downloaded them to your PC?  I think you have to rename them so
they end with the .mtx extension (does anyone know if this is
required?) and then you can open them up in PC Pine.  They are
read-only but it's a great way to archive and retrieve old
messages.

Good luck,
Nancy

PS - Another option for storing mail messages on a PC is to
convert them to a Web of HTMLized messages using something
like MHonArc and then use your Web browser to access them.