Subject: PINE and mbox

From: "Mike A. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 06:32:51 -0500 (EST)

When a user runs pine with an mbox, pine moves all mail in
/var/spool/mail to the inbox.  This behavior is not desireable,
especially for users tat use PINE locally, as well as using
another MUA remotely via POP/IMAP.

Is there an easy way to disable this misfeature?

Would disabling it in the source have any negative effects for
users?  Why would anyone want PINE to move their inbox to mbox
based merely on mbox's existance?

-- 
Mike A. Harris                  Mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer             190 Pittsburgh Ave.
Red Hat Inc.                    Sault Ste. Marie,
(705)949-2136                   Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3

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From: Gopi Sundaram <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 10:28:35 -0500 (EST)

> Is there an easy way to disable this misfeature?

Please read the following thread, especially Msg 5 by Eduardo Chappa:

http://www.deja.com/[ST_rn=ps]/viewthread.xp?AN=661001917%26group=comp.mail.pine

-- 
Gopi Sundaram
[email-masked]
http://www.cse.sc.edu/~gopalan/Pine/

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From: "Ed Greshko" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 08:30:23 +0800

Mike,

To answer one of your questions....

> Why would anyone want PINE to move their inbox to mbox

Because some systems have a quotas set in the directory were users' inboxes are
located.

Ed

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From: "Mike A. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 19:41:46 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Ed Greshko wrote:

>Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 08:30:23 +0800
>From: Ed Greshko <[email-masked]>
>To: Pine Discussion Forum <[email-masked]>
>Content-Type: text/plain;
>	charset="us-ascii"
>Subject: RE: PINE and mbox
>
>Mike,
>
>Because some systems have a quotas set in the directory were
>users' inboxes are located.

Fair enough.  Why would someone without a quota want this?
In other words, how does one enable disable it selectively?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
      Mike A. Harris  -  Linux advocate  -  Open source advocate
          This message is copyright 2000, all rights reserved.
  Views expressed are my own, not necessarily shared by my employer.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Favorite quotes of Linus Torvalds - Sept 6, 2000]
I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think
otherwise. Yet they do. People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that
I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings
or lost hours of work if it just results in what I consider to be a better
system.  And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. 
I can say "I don't care" with a straight face, and really mean it.
        -- Linus Torvalds on linux-kernel mailing list

---

From: Eduardo Chappa <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 16:45:41 -0800 (PST)

*** Ed Greshko ([email-masked]) wrote in the pine-info list...:

:) > Why would anyone want PINE to move their inbox to mbox
:) > based merely on mbox's existance?
:)
:) Because some systems have a quotas set in the directory were users'
:) inboxes are located.

That's understandable, however it strikes me that in some aspects Pine
does not change its defaults because it does not want to confuse the user,
even if it were in the convenience of him/her, but in some others it does
and it confuses everyone. In my personal opinion if there was consistency
in policy the mbox driver should be disabled by default, now it's too
late.˜

-- 
Eduardo
http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/

---

From: Eduardo Chappa <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 16:47:59 -0800 (PST)

*** Mike A. Harris ([email-masked]) wrote in the pine-info...:

:) Fair enough.  Why would someone without a quota want this?
:) In other words, how does one enable disable it selectively?

Gopi pointed out a link which answers your question. Read the whole
thread. If after following those directions you still have problems,
please let us know what failed.

---

From: "Ed Greshko" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 09:30:11 +0800

Eduardo,

> in policy the mbox driver should be disabled by default, now it's too

For as long as I can remember it has been the behavior of pine that the
existance of a mbox file in the home directory resulted in moving mails from the
inbox to mbox.  I believe this behavior has been documented.  One "can" argue
that the mbox driver is disabled by default since it is unlikely that a user
will have an mbox file in their home directory unless they intend to use the
feature.

I believe that you are right in stating that new releases of pine do not, in
general, change default settings so as not to confuse the end-user.  However,
sometimes things do change which may or may not cause confusion depending on the
end-user.

Pine, of course, has hundreds of thousands end-users.  I believe it strives to
satisfy the needs of the "majority" with an occasional slant towards "best
practice" and "wage payers".

However, as long as the development team puts up a "README.first" or "CHANGES"
to highlight the differences they have done their job.  If I don't read these
documents, and I often don't, I need not look further than the mirror to find
the problem.

Ed

---

From: Eduardo Chappa <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 18:23:26 -0800 (PST)

*** Ed Greshko ([email-masked]) wrote on Dec 4, 2000:

:) For as long as I can remember it has been the behavior of pine that
:) the existance of a mbox file in the home directory resulted in
:) moving mails from the inbox to mbox.  I believe this behavior has
:) been documented.  One "can" argue that the mbox driver is disabled
:) by default since it is unlikely that a user will have an mbox file
:) in their home directory unless they intend to use the feature.

Actually, as long as I can remember, I remember the opposite. I admit I
may be wrong though. My advisor before he moved from "mail" to "pine" had
a huge "mbox" file. I have serious reasons to believe that in the
beginning mail was not moved from the server to the mbox file, because
otherwise he would have noticed that, so I believe that actually moving
mail from the server to the mbox file is not something that old. Of course
the driver may be old, but the default behavior of using it instead of
your server I believe is not that old.

:) However, as long as the development team puts up a "README.first" or
:) "CHANGES" to highlight the differences they have done their job.
:) If I don't read these documents, and I often don't, I need not look
:) further than the mirror to find the problem.

I found this information in:

ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/old/pine4.01.RelNotes

<quote>
  Regarding mail disappearing from the system spool directory:

      Beginning with Pine 4.00 (but also with earlier versions of the
      University of Washington's imapd server), a new INBOX access method
      is available as part of the standard configuration. It is called
      the "mbox" driver and it works like this:

      If the file "mbox" exists in the user's home directory, and is in
      Unix mailbox format, then when INBOX is opened this file will be
      selected as INBOX instead of the mail spool file. Messages will be
      automatically transferred from the mail spool file into the mbox
      file. Beginning with Pine 4.01, a message is displayed whenever
      Pine copies messages from the system mail spool directory to the
      mbox file.
[...]
      To disable this behavior, either remove/rename the "mbox" file or
      find the "disable-these-drivers=" variable in your Pine
      configuration file and add "mbox" to it. You must manually edit the
      config file so that you see the following:

      disable-these-drivers=mbox
</quote> (I apologize for the long quote)

  This makes me believe that Pine has not always behaved in the same way
about this driver. What seems to be the case, as I understand here is that
the use of the mbox driver as an INBOX access method is new. Not the
driver itself. My point was that Pine never changes without a
configuration option that you can set after having compiled it, so it's
surprising to see this new behavior, and make it the default (in another
words, I would have expected to see a new variable
enable-these-extra-drivers or something of that sort)

  Finally, I believe there is a bug in Pine with respect to this feature,
which I tested in a clean version of pine4.30.99, with the imapd server of
the same version. I followed the following steps:

 - create an empty "mbox" file (touch mbox).
 - edit .pinerc and add the value "mbox" to your disable-these-drivers
   variable, it should look like this:

   disable-these-drivers=mbox

 - start pine with some message in your inbox
 - cat mbox (in another screen)

  The result is that "mbox" contains the message that I had in my inbox,
whose path points out to the server. In another words, the message was
moved.  This is a bug, because mbox should have been empty at the end of
the test.

---

From: "Ed Greshko" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 11:54:58 +0800

Eduardo,

> </quote> (I apologize for the long quote)

No problem.....

> about this driver.

I've been using Pine since the 3.9X days (or was it really 3.8X???) and I feel
it has always acted this way.  I've long since removed 3.9X stuff from my
systems so I can't go back and check...and it really doesn't matter in any case.

I think what you would like to see is YAP (Yet Another Parameter) in pine.
Since there isn't any existing parameter and since the behavior of the feature
is documented it would seem that a YAP doesn't seem warranted when you consider
that it may confuse even more people.  Sounds like another good debate for the
developers.

> the same version. I followed the following steps:

If pine4.30.99 is a beta for pine4.31 then there is a good chance you can report
and get the bug fixed before it goes into production.

Ed