Subject: Re: Pine 3.95 and multiple folders and filtering, etc

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 10:25:39 -0500 (EST)

On Sat, 15 Feb 1997, Daniel M. Griswold wrote:

> For a while I did something similar to what (aparently) you want to do. 
> And I found that Pine handles your concern fairly well. If you have 
> incoming folders set up properly in your .pinerc, then when you are done 
> reading all the mail in your Inbox, hitting tab should bring you to the 
> next folder with unread mail. If no unread mail, then you won't be forced 
> to look at the folder. I say this based on my recollection, so I 
> apologize if I am in error.

Hmm.. that sounds interesting. 

But it is still not what I am looking for. Say procmail siphons off my mail
into 3 of such incoming folders that I defined as above. Looking at Pine,
which is displaying my INBOX (primary incoming mail), I have *no* way to know
exactly how many messages are waiting for me in each of my other folders in my
incoming folder collections.

I like the way Pine changes my Xterm icon/title to tell me that '3 new
messages. Most recent from John Doe'. 

Is there a way I can get similar functionality (a summary report) of all my
new messages in all my incoming folders? Or am I asking too much from Pine?

From what you say, the only option I have is to merrily <Tab> along blindly!
What I am looking for is a cure screen that I can invoke on-demand that tells
me the number of new messages in each of my incoming folders! 

Also, Pine does not beep or do anything special when a message is filtered off
into a incoming folder other than INBOX. In a given day, say I am working with
Pine iconized, how am I going to tell that procmail just did a bit of work and
channelled a mail to folder XXX? 

More importantly, this method forces me to read mail in a extremely *linear*
fashion and to an extent, blindly! I cant see that Oh! Folder XXX has 10
messages, let me go there first. I *have* to <Tab> through junk until I get to
Folder XXX. Of course, I can always Goto Folder XXX but then that defeats the
purpose, right? I want a summary screen of how many new messages are there in
each of my incoming folders!

Oh well.. I guess I am asking for too much...

> The problem that I was never able to solve was now to get the frm command 
> to display new messages from these other folders. For some reason, frm 
> (and related commands) could not seem to discern message status well on 
> folders other than Inbox.

What 'frm' command are you referring to? 

Thanks for responding,
--Vikas

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From: "Daniel M. Griswold" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 18:52:03 -0600 (CST)

Vikas,

To recap for others (and make sure I'm on track): you want some way to
tell how many (if any) new messages await you in each of your incoming
folders, so that you may make your own choices of which messages to view.
"Tabbing blindly"  (nicely put, by whomever) is too linear and brute-force
a method to satisfy you. And I agree. 

My attempt at a solution from some time ago was one that relied on the
unix command 'frm'. What frm does is display information about mail
folders. (It is the same as 'from', except that 'from' displays senders in
uucp format, while 'frm' uses the person's name.) So, I used mine to tell
me the status of my incoming folders if and only if they had new mail in
them. I included the appropriate commands and structures in my .login
file.

The trouble was, the frm command could not acurately discern the status of
folders other than Inbox until Pine had somehow "touched" them (for lack
of a more precise term). To be more precise, this is what would happen: I
would log into my account, I would get a message telling me that there
were a certain number of messages in my Inbox (the regular folder, for
non-filtered mail). And nothing else would appear. "Too bad," I would
think. "No other mail." But then I would go into Pine, read my Inbox
stuff, and then on a lark go to one of the other folders. And it would
have stuff in there! Now if I then went out to Unix and ran the same
command that was previously blind, it would now see. Go figure.

Now I realize that you are using an X-Window system over top of Unix. And
there I can't say any more. I have used X, but only a few times. Although
the experience I have related here might give you some ideas to try out. 

Regards,
Dan

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Dan Griswold				internet: 	 [email-masked]
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