Subject: Re: Compression script for Pine - UNIX users.

From: [email-masked] (Tim Mooney)
Date: 3 Nov 1996 23:44:12 -0600

[cc'ed and posted]

In article <[email-masked]>,
David Hunt  <[email-masked]> wrote:
  
> Some time ago I began to have problems with 'over-quota' warnings due to
> a much too large mail file. I wrote a small script to compress the files
> in the mail directory between Pine sessions, ending the quota warnings. 

Just don't do that to your INBOX.

> This script utilizes gzip compression, and reduces the size of the mail
> files to 35% of original.

Unless you've set GZIP="--best" in your environment, you could get better
compression (at the expense of longer compression time) by adding a -9
or --best to the gzip command.

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

---

From: [email-masked] (Tim Mooney)
Date: 5 Nov 1996 15:49:42 -0600

In article <[email-masked]>,
David Hunt  <[email-masked]> wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Nov 1996, Tim Mooney wrote:
> Since the script runs gzip processes before pine is run, and again after
> pine is finished, I don't see how it could affect INBOX.

The way you're using it, it wouldn't being your INBOX is in another directory.
I was warning against someone else taking your lead and applying the same 
procedure to their INBOX, which is a bad idea.

> I've been
> running the script for 6 months now with no problems re. INBOX. This
> brings up some questions I had not considered re. INBOX configuration,
> incoming folders, etc. I've only got INBOX, without incoming folders
> enabled. In this case, the INBOX is really a peice of the mail spool. 

Right, but since many Unix machines have world write access on the mail
spool directory (generally with the sticky bet set), you *could* (but
shouldn't!!) run gzip on your mail spool file too.  It was doing this that
I was warning against.

> Since INBOX isn't in any of my directories, then it should be safe from
> the ravages of gzip. (INBOX appears as a folder in mail/[] when using
> pine, but never shows in that directory when doing 'ls -al' on mail.)
> Are there configurations of pine that could endager the INBOX if they
> had gzip run on the directory 'mail'?

Sure.  If you do any mail filtering via an external program such as procmail,
filter, et. al., and the messages are filtered into folders in your mail
directory, then the same problems would occur.  You just need to guard against
compressing a mail file that could have new mail appended to it.  That's
all I'm warning about.

Tim