Subject: compressing in pine

From: "Stephen and Amy Brown" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 23:17:23 -0400

Hello,
I am a student at WVNCC in New Martinsville, WV.  We are currnetly using
pine for our Interent Research class and I have what I hope is a simple
question.  I know that I can expunge in Pine but is there a way to compress
our mail also.  I thought perhaps expunge would do it but when I exit pine
I still have to go in and compress my mail seperatley.  Is there any way to
compress in pine? If so please tell me how.  Thank you for taking the time
to read and answer this post.

                                              SBrown

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From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 12:08:39 -0400

> to read and answer this post.

    By "compress the mail" I am supposing that you mean mail and/or
news stored in folders after it has already been read.  Correct me if
I am wrong.  (It is possible to filter incoming mail out of the INBOX
and into folders, such as with procmail, but it might be awkward to 
compress these folders when the incoming mail filter process is
potentially always running in the background, so that a folder could
wind up a mixture of compressed and uncompressed.)

    I am not aware of any way to make Pine compress its mail folders
directly.  However, I once saw a script -- which I did not save --
which one would invoke in place of Pine.  It would first uncompress the
folders and then run Pine for you.  After you exited Pine, it would
recompress the folders.  Such a script would have to allow for the
possibility of folders deleted and created during the Pine session.
That script might have been posted on comp.mail.pine, in which case
somebody might be able to provide it.  As I recall, though, it was a
Un*x shell script, and you did not say what operating system you are
using Pine under.  Also, if you're running short of disk space, which
is why you want to compress the folders, be aware that with a script
like this,. for the duration of the time that Pine is running, the
folders would exist in all their expanded glory.

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
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