Subject: New with questions

From: Ralph Slooten <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 23:30:49 +0100 (CET)

Hi there all,

Firstly I have to say that I am very new to Pine as I have always been
using graphical clients in the past. The main reason for the migration....
reliability. You see, as I'm sure most of yo do I get a hell of a lot of
mail (from mailing list like thse) and require good and efficient filters.
In the past I have had about 2000 messages all mixed up (some personal and
the rest mailing list contents), due to bugs in the filtering system and
E-mail program. Also, I just love the "simplicity" and speed of Pine.

However the few questions I have do concern the basic setup of Pine.
Firstly, never having worked with Pine before I was required to install and
setup Sendmail (which seems to work great), and Fetchmail. Reading the
documentation of Fetchmail, I set up a simple script which basically
downloads from my POP3 server into /var/spool/mail/ralph . Ok, no problem
there. In the setup of Pine I now have set my "INBOX" to
/var/spool/mail/ralph . Again, no problems with that. Just I wonder is that
is the "formal" way of doing it? It does work rather efficiently, reporting
newly delivered messages and all. Just the thing is that I feel a need to
then move all messages into appropriate folders, just in case something
happens to the spool file. Am I just being paniod / ignorant, or is there
another "normal" way to go about this?

Second question is: When I have filters running, any new mail received gets
moved without a problem into the appropriate folders, however I get no
indication that there is new mail! Is this normal, or is there a way to
"see" that new mail has arrived, and where they have been placed into? This
would be without having to physically browse though every single folder
that is :-) Maybe there is an option to see how many E-mails are enclosed
in each folder ~ How many new and old? All I get to see now are just plain
folder names.

Third question is: Somewhere I read that the newe Pine (4.30 ~ The one I
am using now) has PGP support. Great! I use it quite regularily, and that
was one of the reasons I chose Pine. Just where and how can I encorporate
PGP into Pine? I see a line in the config that says something about Gnupg,
and I'm guessing that would have to be replaced with some PGP command, but
I find nowhere any documentation about this. Any ideas?

Many thanks in advance,

Ralph

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From: Frank Tobin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 20:37:13 -0600 (CST)

> another "normal" way to go about this?

The "normal" way is to use procmail, which requires knowledge outside of
Pine; procmail filters your messages as they are delivered, without the
need of Pine being up and running.  The most basic functionality of
procmail includes moving messages into folders based upon pattern-matching
the messages.  Procmail can be a little confusing at first, but there are
good tutorials available.

> Second question is: When I have filters running, any new mail received
> gets moved without a problem into the appropriate folders, however I
> get no indication that there is new mail! Is this normal, or is there
> a way to "see" that new mail has arrived, and where they have been
> placed into? This would be without having to physically browse though
> every single folder that is :-) Maybe there is an option to see how
> many E-mails are enclosed in each folder ~ How many new and old? All I
> get to see now are just plain folder names.

Pine doesn't "listen" to a mailbox/file unless you have it open (though it
would be interesting if it did).  Hence, it doesn't know if a new message
has arrived in a box you are not actively accessing.  If you want
folder-based notification, I can highly recommend the graphically-based
program xbuffy; I cannot find an authoritative site for it, but searches
on Google pop up a lot of useful hits.

> I find nowhere any documentation about this. Any ideas?

For various reasons, I really like using pgpenvelope, which is capable of
incorporating GnuPG with Pine.  Ease of use was a central factor in
pgpenvelope's design.  pgpenvelope is available at
http://pgpenvelope.sourceforge.net/

- -- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.uiuc.edu/~ftobin/

---

From: Ralph Slooten <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 11:23:10 +0100 (CET)

> good tutorials available.
...........

> http://pgpenvelope.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for the tip :-) Just something doesn't make scence... Why would I
want to use Procmail to filter all my incomming messages when Pine has
built in filters? Is there anything wrong with the way I have set things
up, or anything I should watch out for. I have realised that typing in
"mail" tends to empty my inbox and place the contents into /home/ralph/mbox
to something to that effect :-) Just one of the command to stay away from I
guess :-)

Another thing is pgpenvelope seems to only support Gnupg, but no worries, I
have installed pgp4pine and it seems to be working really great (well not
with pgp v7.0 but with the older one v6.58). As long as it works, I'm happy
:-)

Thanks again

Ralph