Subject: Broken "sent-mail" and "postpone" features

From: Chris Harris <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 21:29:50 -0700 (PDT)

I've broken the sent mail and postpone features of pine.  Here are the
details:

We've made 3 modifications to the c-client lib on top of which we've built
pine 4.02 (without the new patch):

1) the c-client "home directory" is "<user's home>/mail", instead of
   "<user's home>"
2) the default mailbox is "<user's home>/mail/INBOX", not in
   /var/spool/mail (We are using tmail to deliver messages here.)
2) the default mailbox creation format is mbx

Due to modification #1, I've had to make one small change in the
/usr/local/lib/pine.conf, pasted in below:

  # Syntax: optnl-label {optnl-imap-hostname}optnl-directory-path[]
  folder-collections= Desktop []

This is needed because, as I've set things up, the mail folders are
directly in the c-client "home dir", not in "<home dir>/mail", as pine
expects.

Now, when I try to send a message (from any account), the following rules
apply:

1) if ~user/mail/sent-mail doesn't exist, pine prompts me for its
   creation; when I say yes, sent-mail is created, and a copy of the
   message is saved there before being sent, as normal

2) if ~user/mail/sent-mail *does* exist, and is in valid mbx format, pine
   says that "sent-mail doesn't exist".  That's right, "doesn't".  Then:

   a) if I ask pine to create sent-mail, it gives a failure message which
      is too long to fit in the status window.  Of course, the reason for
      failure is that sent-mail already exists!

#2 here, of course, is incorrect behavior.

A similar situation involves postponing messages; if the postponed
messages folder doesn't exist, things work normally.  Otherwise, it tries
to create the already-existing folder, and fails -- with the result that I
can't postpone more than one message.

I am at a loss to understand this seemingly irrational behavior on the
part of pine/c-client.  Are my three modifications to pine, together, some
sort of technological sin, of which I am unaware?  Is there a bug in
pine/c-client?

Thanks for any assistance!

-Chris

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From: Michael Talbot-Wilson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1998 14:55:36 +0930 (CST)

>       failure is that sent-mail already exists!

I've done something similar, at least as regards the INBOX location, but
by editing $HOME/.pinerc:

	inbox-path=~/.mail/inbox/$USER

The other folders are in ~/mail as usual.  I'm using 'deliver' as the
sendmail delivery agent.

I think this will break ipop3d and imapd, because I haven't been able
to work out a simple source configuration which would persuade them to
look in the user's home directory instead of /var/spool/mail.  I don't
know if $HOME would be iterpreted at runtime.  Therefore I've put
symlinks for each user in /var/spool/mail.

I haven't tried POP and IMAP yet, but Pine works normally for telnet and
console users.  I realise you have made other changes, and this possibly
won't help.

People want to do things like this (at least in my case) to keep the
user's mail in the user's disk quota.  I was a little surprised that imapd
and ipop3d are (apparently) not configurable as to source directory, and
the point is ignored in the documentation.

Rgds, mtw

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From: Chris Harris <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1998 11:28:49 -0700 (PDT)

You can get ipop3d and imapd to work with your setup with a very small
modification to c-client.  The file to edit is call env_unix.c, and, in
the latest uw-imap distribution, it is located in src/osdep/unix.  You
just modify the function sysInbox(), which returns the path to the file
where the default inbox goes.  In my case, I've replaced the following
commented-out line with the non-comment line:

    /*sprintf (tmp,"%s/%s",MAILSPOOL,myusername ());*/
    sprintf (tmp,"%s/INBOX",myHomeDir);          

In my setup, myHomeDir refers to ~user/mail.  Since you haven't made this
change, the %s in your sprintf will refer to plain old ~user, and you can
choose the mailbox path as is appropriate.

Perhaps this could be easier, but at least it is workable.  Thanks to Mark
for putting the reference to this file in the docs.

-Chris