Subject: pine as productivity tool

From: "Patrick C.P. Cheung" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 10:30:04 PST

My message seems to have reached comp.mail.pine newsgroup but not
the pine discussion forum, so I am sending the message directly
to the latter:

Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 17:28:50 -0800
From: "Patrick C.P. Cheung" <[email-masked]>
Newsgroups: comp.mail.pine
Subject: pine as productivity tool

I managed to use pine as a productivity tool in addition to its
primary role of handling my emails on a sun-unix system.  The way
I use pine may be trivial to advance pine/unix users but I'll
include how I use them in this mail.  Hopefully that is useful
for beginners as well as stimulating the development of other
tools based on pine.  Lastly, I have difficulties applying the
same tools in PC-pine and need help in this forum. 

I developed batch files for taking and checking notes, and to
edit a file that tracks contact information for vendors.  These
are all off-line applets.

The mail file format is attractive as a note taker as well as a
contact manager for me, due to several reasons.  The notes are
time-stamped and concatenated inside a single file and so is easy
to archive chronologically.  Besides, the convenient ";ta" 
aggregate command in pine allows me to locate a specific note
quickly, this user interface is much better than many new Windows
programs. As a tool to keep track of vendor contacts, pine's
index is well suited to list the vendors' name, and the content
of each piece of "mail" includes when and what I have talked to
the person or company for.  All these are simple but important
information that I don't want to place in scattered, small text
files which will become hard to manage and hard to invent new
file names for as the number of files increases.  Last but not
least, I have to use or enter these data from more than one
computer. Windows 95 or NT quickly becomes inefficient because
data cannot be easily shared between same program opened on two
different computers. A html-based notes and contact applets can
be a good alternative but I don't currently have the skills to
develop applets like that. 

My key trick in using pine to do the tasks above is to run pine
with different .pinerc's.

For example, the batch file "note" opens pine in a compose
session and append content directly to where Fcc: points to.
You can even run "note" while another pine is monitoring your
email, because this copy of pine doesn't interfere with inbox.
Here is the batch file:
#! /bin/csh -f
$HOME/bin/pine.exe -p $HOME/.pinerc_notes "" 

In .pinerc_notes I changed the following lines from what is
common in .pinerc
default-fcc=notes 
signature-file=".pine_notes_message"  
default-composer-hdrs=Subject:

To read notes directly, my batch file "checknotes" contains:
#! /bin/csh -f
$HOME/bin/pine.exe -p $HOME/.pinerc_checknotes -f notes 

In .pinerc_checknotes I used the following key options to start 
selecting strings right away.
[X]  auto-zoom-after-select 
[X]  enable-aggregate-command-set
initial-keystroke-list   = i
                           ;
                           t
                           a  

To make pine keep track of vendor contacts, the data file has to
be edit-able and that is accomplished in pine via a suggestion
from this newsgroup to place mail into the postponed-msgs box. 
Here is my batch file "contact":
#! /bin/csh -f
$HOME/bin/pine.exe -p $HOME/.pinerc_contact -i -f vendors 

In .pinerc_contact the essential lines I changed are
postponed-folder         = vendors 
default-composer-hdrs    = Subject:
viewer-hdrs              = Subject:      
index-format             = MSGNO DATE SIZE SUBJECT(100%)
mail-check-interval      = 15            

The above tools seem to work quite well on my unix system. 
However, I am trying to duplicate the same applets on pc-pine on
an off-line system (at home) but I ran into a pine error whenever
I run the compose command.  The error message is "Can't send
message without an open remote folder".  Someone has suggested
changing the smtp=server line in the configuration to
"localhost", but this didn't help.  I appreciate any suggestions
to make the tools work on pc-pine offline.

Patrick Cheung, research scientist   Xerox PARC, MS 35-1674
(O) 650-812-4338 (FAX) 650-812-4334   3333 Coyote Hill Road
[email-masked]                  Palo Alto, CA 94304