Subject: Pine under Windows with mbox

From: Thomas Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 04:34:36 +0100 (MET)

Dear all,

I have very happily used (and still use) Pine under Unix.  However, I
am moving towards working primarily in a Windows environment, and like
posters before me, I was dismayed to find that PC-Pine does not by
default share the mbox format of Unix Pine (see below).

I see that PC-Pine can read and write the mbox format, and Nancy
McGough very reasonably suggested that this be configurable as the
default.  However, my search of this list suggests that this idea has
not been taken up by the developers, and if the workaround is to
preappend #driver.unix all the time, this does not seem very pratical.

I was happy then to discover that Baochun Li has recompiled Pine (as I
understand it) to use by default the mbox format instead of "c-client
MBX" (see http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~bli/personal.html).  However,
the binary he provides does not work on my machine (a laptop with
WIN2000 and Cygwin as of December) -- when I run it, it always exits
with a segmentation fault.  I tried downloading the sources and patch
he provides, but I am not a programmer and the build exited with many
errors.

Desperate for a solution, I have installed and tested a number of
alternatives, including Eudora, Pegasus, and Opera -- some of which use
a variant of the mbox format, though I have discovered to my dismay
that the implementation details of this "standard" vary somewhat
between programs, and that the programs tend to be very particular
about CRLF versus LF.

Eager to get on with my real work, I have come to the tentative
conclusion that I need to download the same email stream into two mail
clients -- eudora.exe both for browsing URLs contained in message text
and for collecting attached binaries automatically in a default
directory; and mutt.exe for processing the mail into various mbox files
(and not just in the default directory) and editing my responses with
vim.

Rather than go with this somewhat elaborate set-up and learn a
completely new mail client, I would just as soon stay with Pine, but
the MBX format is simply unacceptable.  Have I left any stones
unturned?

Many thanks,
Tom

P.S. I would be willing to pay to get this working.

Message http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/2001.04/msg00110.html:

  --On Saturday, 28 April, 2001 Timothy Luoma wrote:
  > Well I split the mailbox using sed, formail and procmail, and now
  > have access to my messages again....
  >
  > Is there NO way to force PC-PINE to use regular flat files?
  > (Performance is not as critical to me as not being locked out of my
  > mailbox ever again!)
  >
  >> Larger Issue #2) I have now discovered, much to my horror and
  >> dismay, that PC-PINE (unlike Unix pine) does not store my email
  >> messages in plain text, but in some proprietary format that does
  >> not allow me to open my 'read' mailbox in a text editor and see
  >> the text.  WHY IS THAT?!?!??!  Can I make PC-PINE use regular flat
  >> files?

  I've had the same frustrations you've had Tim and I refuse to use MBX
  mailboxes until there are tools (for both Unix and Windows) to
  *easily* fix a corrupted MBX mailbox. Another problem with MBX
  mailboxes is that you cannot use any of the tools that assume your
  local mailboxes are in Unix mbox format, for example grepmail (which
  is amazingly cool BTW) and Mulberry [+]. Mulberry -- like all IMAP
  clients -- can access MBX mailboxes using IMAP though. The way that I
  ensure my mailboxes are in Unix mbox format is to:

  1) Mainly store my mailboxes on a UW IMAP server that defaults to use
  Unix mbox format.

  2) If I need a mailbox on my PC for some reason (e.g. I want to
  access it when I'm offline), I ftp the mailbox from the Unix system
  to my PC.

  3) Use Cygwin Pine which defaults to creating local mailboxes in Unix
  mbox format. [+]

  4) If I need to create a local mailbox with PC-Pine, I specify the
  mailbox name like this:

       #driver.unix\relative\path\to\mailbox

  where the path is relative to %HOME%. Or like this

       #driver.unix\\full\path\to\mailbox

  where the full path is on the current drive (usually C:). Or like this

       #driver.unix\D:\full\path\to\mailbox

  where the full path is on D drive.

  As you can imagine, this is a pain when you want to create a mailbox
  in a /really/long/directory/path/that/is/not/relative/to/HOME.
  Unfortunately, #driver.unix is not aware of the current folder
  collection and gives a message like this

   [Folder "#driver.unix\mailbox" created outside current collection]

  if you try to add a mailbox to the current collection.

  REQUEST TO PINE DEVELOPERS
  ==========================
  * Have "#driver.unix\relative\path\to\mailbox" be relative to the
  current  collection rather than %HOME%.

  * Add a variable to Pine that lets a PC-Pine user specify the default
  mailbox format. I tried doing this:

     disable-these-drivers=mbx

  but that didn't work.

  * Add information to the Pine web site about #driver.unix. If it's
  already there, change the search engine so that when you do a search
  for "driver.unix", the relevant pages show up. Maybe this is just a
  matter of telling users how to escape a period in the PIC search
  engine???
  QUESTION
  ========
  Does anyone know where I can find a precompiled version of UW IMAP
  for Cygwin? This way I could use mbxcopy and mbxcvt to convert MBX
  mailboxes on my PC to Unix mbox format. Also I could access and
  create all my local PC mailboxes using UW IMAP and thus they would
  default to being in Unix mbox format.

  Thanks,
  Nancy
  posted & cc'd

  [+] For info about grepmail, Cygwin Pine, a comparison of Pine &
  Mulberry, and lots more Pine info, see

       http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/

  --
  Nancy McGough          http://www.ii.com          Infinite Ink

_______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Baker                                         [email-masked]
Birlinghoven Library, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Institutszentrum Schloss Birlinghoven                          +49-2241-14-2352
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany                              fax +49-2241-14-2619

Home: Stubenrauchstr. 64                           home-office +49-30-8109-9027
      14167 Berlin, Germany                             mobile +49-171-408-5784

_______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Baker                                         [email-masked]
Birlinghoven Library, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Institutszentrum Schloss Birlinghoven                          +49-2241-14-2352
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany                              fax +49-2241-14-2619

Home: Stubenrauchstr. 64                           home-office +49-30-8109-9027
      14167 Berlin, Germany                             mobile +49-171-408-5784

_______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Baker                                         [email-masked]
Birlinghoven Library, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Institutszentrum Schloss Birlinghoven                          +49-2241-14-2352
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany                              fax +49-2241-14-2619

Home: Stubenrauchstr. 64                           home-office +49-30-8109-9027
      14167 Berlin, Germany                             mobile +49-171-408-5784

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From: Thomas Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 17:31:00 +0100 (MET)

After posting this yesterday I received the helpful suggestion that the
NT/WIN2000 binary for Cygwin Pine using the Unix mbox as default would
run correctly in an xterm window under Cygwin.  Whereupon I discovered
that Cygwin does indeed have an Xwindows environment (see
http://www.cygwin.com/xfree).  After downloading about 30 MB of
tarballs and installing this, which went smoothly, I find that pine.exe
does indeed run in an xterm.  However, it does not look particularly
nice (cramped size, tiny font, etc) and the entire windowing
environment is controlled by its own arcane configuration files
(.xinitrc, etc).

Before I spend another day trying to get this working right and looking
readable, I would appreciate if anyone has insight on whether this
approach will be satisfactory in the end.  As I re-read Nancy McGough's
wonderful, detailed commentaries (at http://www.ii.com), it looks like
the Cygwin-based approach will not allow me to click on URLs and pass
them to a browser, which seems like a heavy sacrifice.

In the meantime, I have managed to get the mutt- and fetchmail-based
Unixmail suite partially to work (see
http://unixmail-w32.sourceforge.net), but the store-and-forward part
will evidently require more tweaking, and the urlview interface that
works under Linux (for invoking an external browser) has, that I have
found, not yet been ported to NT/WIN2000.

In sum, PC-Pine still looks like the most desirable solution were it
not for its default non-mbox, non-flat-text format for mailboxes.
Frustratingly, having to #driver.unix\full\pathname\to\mailbox every
time I start a new file seems unnecessary -- the mbox format is already
supported, shouldn't it be possible a) to select mbox as a default and
b) to name folders relate to the current collection?  After all, this
is how the Unix Pine works, and shouldn't the two be compatible??  Or
are there longer-term political issues here regarding mailbox formats
and compatibility that I should know about?

If there are any experts out there who can help, I am very willing to
pay for some assistance in this area.  I don't mind reading
documentation and figuring things out but this has gone too far -- I
need to get back to my "real" work now...!

Many thanks,
Tom

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2002 19:54:48 +0000 (GMT)

On 21 Feb 2002 Thomas Baker ([email-masked]) wrote:
> In sum, PC-Pine still looks like the most desirable solution
> were it not for its default non-mbox, non-flat-text format for
> mailboxes. Frustratingly, having to
> #driver.unix\full\pathname\to\mailbox every time I start a new
> file seems unnecessary -- the mbox format is already supported,
> shouldn't it be possible a) to select mbox as a default and b)
> to name folders relate to the current collection?  After all,
> this is how the Unix Pine works, and shouldn't the two be
> compatible??  Or are there longer-term political issues here
> regarding mailbox formats and compatibility that I should know
> about?

As you know, I also would like it very much if it were possible
to set up PC-Pine to use Unix mail spool (aka mbox) format as its
default folder format. I don't have any insight into what the
Pine team thinks about this, but here are some of my thoughts
about the issue.

Since Pine is designed to be an IMAP and NNTP client, it makes
sense to me for the Pine team to focus their energy on making
Pine great at accessing messages using IMAP or NNTP. I am a big
fan of componentization and so I like the idea of having the
access protocol and the server deal with issues like folder
format and locking. So, it seems to me that the solution is

>> Run an IMAP server on your PC that supports mbox format <<

and then access your local messages using PC-Pine and IMAP. Now
the question is: What PC IMAP server to use? I have a Win 98SE
machine with only 64 meg of memory so I need something that won't
use much of my system's resources -- what do people recommend? I
would only use it for local IMAP access (ie, no requests coming
from the Net).

Here are some other ideas for using mbox format with PC-Pine:

* If a folder is already in mbox format, PC-Pine leaves it in
  that format. So, if you want to create a local folder named
  FOO, you could copy a "seed" mbox folder and rename it FOO.
  Then start saving to/processing/whatever FOO and it will remain
  an mbox folder. You can create the seed folder by using the
  #driver.unix trick.

* Set up Cygwin and periodically run mbxcvt to convert all your
  *.cMBX folders to mbox format.

* Switch to Mac OS X or a flavor of Unix!

Hope this helps,
Nancy
posted & cc'd
^x

-- 
ii Main Pine Page: <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/>

Nancy McGough           <http://www.ii.com/>           Infinite Ink
--= Sent via Pine 4.44: IMAP, NNTP & ESMTP for Unix/Win/MacOS X =--

---

From: Thomas Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 10:11:16 +0100 (MET)

> and then access your local messages using PC-Pine and IMAP. Now

This is a very interesting idea, though I think it shouldn't be
necessary to do this just to solve the mbox problem (maybe there are
other good reasons to run an IMAP server?).  Adding a configuration
routine to the code to spare people from having to type
#driver.unix/some/long/path doesn't seem like it should be a technical
challenge for the developers (since the functionality is already
there), so I can't help wondering if it is somehow a political issue.

> would only use it for local IMAP access (ie, no requests coming

I would be interested in hearing what you find out.

>   an mbox folder. You can create the seed folder by using the

My problem is that I am constantly creating little "folders" with
fairly specific subject-oriented names -- "ecdl2002.review" or
"dc-archi.workplan.tocomment" -- which I am just as constantly sweeping
out of my Folder directory with a script that archives them as
"e:/yr/2002/2002-02-25.ecdl2002.review", etc.  I think all that typing
all those long pathnames would drive me nuts -- I'm sure I would make
at least one typo 50% of the time and have to start over.

> * Switch to Mac OS X or a flavor of Unix!

This last option is looking more and more attractive.  Next week we
will install VMWare for Windows to run Linux on top of Windows.  If
this works, it should relieve me from the tedium of chasing down ports,
alternatives, or workarounds for pine/mutt, procmail, pcal, mpage,
urlview, grepmail, etc.

Tom