Subject: Problem

From: Denise Cole <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 22:01:15 -0400 (EDT)

I don't know how this happened - somehow my INBOX is now 'readonly' and I
don't what that.  I have no idea why this happened suddenly.  This change
occurred after attempting to send a message to an invalid e-mail address.
Any suggestions?

Denise Cole
(617) 623-2242
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (Tim Mooney)
Date: 10 Sep 1996 23:45:28 -0500

In article <[email-masked]>,
> occurred after attempting to send a message to an invalid e-mail address.

Contact your local Help Desk and see if they've seen the problem before, and
have any insight.

There are two situations that I'm aware of that would cause pine to treat
your inbox as readonly.

1) another pine process is accessing your inbox.  Ask your help desk to help
you search the process list of the machine you're on) and make sure that you 
don't have multiple copies of pine running.

2) you may have strange (garbage) characters in the headers of one of the
messages in your inbox.  This is especially likely being you're on an OSF
machine (we've had this happen on one of our Digital Unix machines, and
I've heard similar reports from administrators on other DU machines).

You can ask your Help Desk or system administrator to search the headers
in your inbox with a tool capable of spotting out of band characters.
Something like `od -c' or `less' should work.  Look for characters immediately
preceding the `From ' that begins each new message in your inbox.  You'll
most likely find one or more octal 377 character on one of the headers,
preceding the `From '.

If you do find any out of band characters in your inbox, your sysadmin or
Help Desk will have to delete them using an editor or other tool.  Otherwise
you can just mv your mail spool file to a new name, and a new spool file
will be created for you.  You can see the old messages in your old spool
file with a program like `more' or `less'.

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                              [email-masked]
Information Technology Services         (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J1, IACC Bldg.                 (701) 231-8541 (FAX)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105