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Do people still use Pine?

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Big Brother

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Feb 23, 2006, 5:31:42 PM2/23/06
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If they are who? I figure in the days of webmail, pop3, cell phones, black
berry and whatever many would not be using Pine anymore. I still use it at
times. Its very handy with old computers with dialup accounts in remote
locations. In these environments webmail is simply out of the question.


John


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That's why America is safer with George W. Bush as president" (Arnold
Schwarzenegger, 2004).

Matthew 7:12 Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to
them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Luke 9:23 Then he said to them all: If anyone would come after me, he
must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

Rob Brown

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Feb 23, 2006, 5:56:43 PM2/23/06
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On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Big Brother asked if people still use pine.

I use pine all the time. It is my preferred mail client and news
reader.

And I make my wife and kids use it too.

;-)

- Rob


--

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Mark Crispin

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Feb 23, 2006, 7:04:31 PM2/23/06
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On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Big Brother wrote:
> If they are who? I figure in the days of webmail, pop3, cell phones, black
> berry and whatever many would not be using Pine anymore.

POP3 is actually older technology than Pine; and I would consider moving
from Pine to POP3 to be a step backwards.

The replacement for POP3 is IMAP. Pine was (and IMHO remains) the best
IMAP client implementation.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Chris F.A. Johnson

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Feb 23, 2006, 9:32:58 PM2/23/06
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On 2006-02-23, Big Brother wrote:
> If they are who? I figure in the days of webmail, pop3, cell phones, black
> berry and whatever many would not be using Pine anymore. I still use it at
> times. Its very handy with old computers with dialup accounts in remote
> locations. In these environments webmail is simply out of the question.

Webmail would be my last choice in any environment. I'm on DSL,
with a reasonably fast computer (1.6GHz P4), and prefer Pine to all
other mail clients I've tried.

--
Chris F.A. Johnson, author | <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
Shell Scripting Recipes: | My code in this post, if any,
A Problem-Solution Approach | is released under the
2005, Apress | GNU General Public Licence

Trevor Jenkins

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Feb 24, 2006, 8:46:32 AM2/24/06
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On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 22:31:42 +0000, Big Brother <jo...@sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:

> If they are who? I figure in the days of webmail, pop3, cell phones, black
> berry and whatever many would not be using Pine anymore. I still use it at
> times.

I use it all the time; well except for news reading. Greatest virture is
the absence of JavaScript and automatic derefencing of URLs.

Regards, Trevor

<>< Re: deemed!

LC's NoSpam Newsreading account

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Feb 24, 2006, 10:36:58 AM2/24/06
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On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Big Brother wrote:

> If they are who? I figure in the days of webmail, pop3, cell phones, black
> berry and whatever many would not be using Pine anymore. I still use it at

pop3 is an old thing, imap should be preferred (and the same team which
provides pine, provides an easy to use imap daemon). I use pine locally
on my workstation at work, but my institute provides also several imap
servers. I had an imap server of my own in one case I was away on the
chilean Andes for several week for business. And I have a private
account on a public provider which still uses pop ... and I access it as
a secondary incoming folder from pine.

cell phones, black berry, webmail

I'm one of the rare italians who do not own a cell phone, and I'm likely
never to use cell phones or black berry. Beside the fact I do not NEED
to be called at all times (10 odd hours I spend in the office are
enough), I'm getting older and do not see very well tiny displays.

Strangely enough you do not quote other graphical clients in addition to
webmail. Some of our staff here hate pine and prefer graphical clients
for local use, and webmail for travel. One of them even uses webmail
locally.

Personally I hate those sort of clients, I like pine because : (1) it's
fully RFC standard compliant ; (2) can be easily driven with few
keystrokes ; (3) is highly configurable ... and in a smart way which is
very close to my feeling ... almost all the times I wanted to do
something I found a way to do it in the config.

When travelling for a long time, I prefer to take with me a machine with
pine installed, and activate an imapd on my workstation. If travelling
for a short time, assumed I could not just avoid reading my e-mail for a
couple of days (which I can), I prefer ssh'ing to my machine and use
pine to the usage of a web mailer.

--
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nos...@mi.iasf.cnr.it is a newsreading account used by more persons to
avoid unwanted spam. Any mail returning to this address will be rejected.
Users can disclose their e-mail address in the article if they wish so.

Big Brother

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Feb 24, 2006, 11:51:04 AM2/24/06
to LC's NoSpam Newsreading account
I would agree. I use Outlook 2003 locally, webmail for traveling, and
also use Pine on occassion.

John


On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, LC's NoSpam Newsreading account wrote:

> Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 16:36:58 +0100
> From: LC's NoSpam Newsreading account <nos...@mi.iasf.cnr.it>
> Newsgroups: comp.mail.pine
> Subject: Re: Do people still use Pine?


> nos...@mi.iasf.cnr.it is a newsreading account used by more persons to
> avoid unwanted spam. Any mail returning to this address will be rejected.
> Users can disclose their e-mail address in the article if they wish so.
>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Message has been deleted

Rob Brown

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Feb 24, 2006, 4:36:34 PM2/24/06
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On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Henning Hucke wrote:

> On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Rob Brown wrote:
>
>> [...]


>> And I make my wife and kids use it too.
>>
>> ;-)
>

> You cruel thing you %-).
>
> But to become serious again: What do they say about the usability of
> pine?

They don't complain. They find it easy enough to use. They never
want to do anything complicated, so how hard can it be?

In direct answer to your question: They don't say anything. ;-)

Guido Ostkamp

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Feb 24, 2006, 5:56:53 PM2/24/06
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Rob Brown <mylas...@gmcl.com> wrote:
> They don't complain. They find it easy enough to use. They never
> want to do anything complicated, so how hard can it be?

Of course they do complain - e.g. see my thread with subject "Pine
Shortcomings" which deals with attaching emails to a reply.

Regards,

Guido

Guido Ostkamp

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Feb 24, 2006, 6:02:44 PM2/24/06
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Big Brother <jo...@sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> If they are who? I figure in the days of webmail, pop3, cell phones,
> black berry and whatever many would not be using Pine anymore.

I am a developer in the Unix world, and I use Pine all day long
because I'm used to work in Console windows. Graphical stuff is nice,
but mostly degrades your performance because the most GUI makers don't
pay attention to keyboard shortcuts.

This doesn't mean Pine is perfect - it has its shortcomings - but it
is the best Console based Mail User Agent I've come to see yet.

Regards,

Guido

Message has been deleted

Peter C. Chapin

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Feb 25, 2006, 7:50:31 AM2/25/06
to
"Guido Ostkamp" <gueltig-bis...@nurfuerspam.de> wrote in
news:ktf4d3-...@320076385420-0001.dialin.t-online.de:

> I am a developer in the Unix world, and I use Pine all day long
> because I'm used to work in Console windows. Graphical stuff is nice,
> but mostly degrades your performance because the most GUI makers don't
> pay attention to keyboard shortcuts.
>
> This doesn't mean Pine is perfect - it has its shortcomings - but it
> is the best Console based Mail User Agent I've come to see yet.

I concur with this. I use pine as my primary mail program on the Linux
machine I inhabit at work *and* on my Windows XP laptop (under Cygwin).
It is generally faster than the graphical clients I've played with and
far faster than web mail clients. For example to delete a message I type
'd'. How much easier can it get?

I also like the fact that pine has good conformance to the RFCs. When a
particular message has some strange issue more often than not pine
handles it properly.

Also pine is plenty powerful enough for my current needs. It is true
that I can't compose pretty HTML messages in a WYSIWYG manner. But then,
I never did that when I was using graphical clients either. Pine is
relatively immune to malicous email and that's a plus too. For example,
I know it's not going to try to execute any JavaScript in an email
message (due, say, to a misconfiguration) because it just can't. I see
that as a feature. I don't really want people sending me JavaScript in
email anyway.

There are some things that could be better. Pine's method of displaying
complex attachments (nested multipart messages, for example) can be a
little confusing at times. Also... is there a raw message view option?
There have been a number of times when I've wanted to see the message
exactly as it was received by SMTP so I can review the its MIME
structure. I've resorted to looking at the mail folder file directly;
pine always seems to want to summarize the structure for me.

Anyway, there's my $0.02

Peter

Eduardo Chappa

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Feb 25, 2006, 9:57:24 AM2/25/06
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*** Peter C. Chapin (bapc...@sover.net.comm) wrote in comp.mail.pine today:

:) Also... is there a raw message view option?

Yes, press M S C and enable

[X] enable-full-header-and-text
[X] enable-full-header-cmd

Another configuration option that is relevant is

[ ] quell-full-header-auto-reset

Take a look at its help to see if you want to enable it.

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

Chris Lawrence

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Feb 25, 2006, 1:52:09 PM2/25/06
to
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Big Brother wrote:

> If they are who? I figure in the days of webmail, pop3, cell phones, black
> berry and whatever many would not be using Pine anymore. I still use it at
> times. Its very handy with old computers with dialup accounts in remote
> locations. In these environments webmail is simply out of the question.

I use Pine and love it. I run PC-Pine on my home laptop and Pine in a
BSD shell account. Both versions use the same remote config on an IMAP
mailbox, so anything I do in one is immediately available in the other.
I often write half an email in the shell account, postpone it and pick
it up when I get home in PC-Pine. I also use both for newsgroup
reading, attaching directly to the news server. I need to maintain two
separate lists of subscribed groups but I only have a few so it's no big
deal.

I'm now contemplating moving from Mozilla mail at work to PC-Pine as I'm
accessing a shared IMAP box and a POP3 box. Mozilla's key advantage
over PC-Pine is that I can highlight messages in different colours,
which I use to prioritise them. If PC-Pine can't do this (and I've not
checked) I'll have to stick with Mozilla.

Another great aspect of Pine is that this newsgroup is a wealth of info
and any questions are almost always answered quickly by someone from the
Pine team. You can't buy that level of support with some packages.

--
Chris

Eduardo Chappa

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Feb 25, 2006, 1:58:14 PM2/25/06
to
*** Chris Lawrence (bane...@holosys.co.uk.invalid.comm) wrote in...:

:) I'm now contemplating moving from Mozilla mail at work to PC-Pine as
:) I'm accessing a shared IMAP box and a POP3 box. Mozilla's key
:) advantage over PC-Pine is that I can highlight messages in different
:) colours, which I use to prioritise them. If PC-Pine can't do this (and
:) I've not checked) I'll have to stick with Mozilla.

Pine can do this, Press M S R I to set up how you want messages to be
displayed. The configuration is similar to roles, or filters or scores, so
if you know any of these, you will not have any problem doing this one
either.

--
Eduardo
Patches/Help: http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/
XML/RSS feed: http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/pine.xml
Please send spam to webmaster@localhost

Chris Lawrence

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Feb 25, 2006, 3:34:03 PM2/25/06
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On Sat, 25 Feb 2006, Eduardo Chappa wrote:

> *** Chris Lawrence (bane...@holosys.co.uk.invalid.comm) wrote in...:
>
> :) I'm now contemplating moving from Mozilla mail at work to PC-Pine as
> :) I'm accessing a shared IMAP box and a POP3 box. Mozilla's key
> :) advantage over PC-Pine is that I can highlight messages in different
> :) colours, which I use to prioritise them. If PC-Pine can't do this (and
> :) I've not checked) I'll have to stick with Mozilla.
>
> Pine can do this, Press M S R I to set up how you want messages to be
> displayed. The configuration is similar to roles, or filters or scores, so
> if you know any of these, you will not have any problem doing this one
> either.

Hi Eduardo, I just took a look at that feature and, unless I've missed
something, it can't duplicate what I need to do. In Mozilla I can take
any message entry in my inbox and press 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 and the
line colour is changed to black, blue, red, etc. I use this to
prioritise mail as it comes in. It looks like Pine can only do it
according to a rule of some kind, which is no good for my needs at work.

--
Chris

Eduardo Chappa

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Feb 25, 2006, 4:17:57 PM2/25/06
to
*** Chris Lawrence (bane...@holosys.co.uk.invalid.comm) wrote in...:

:) Hi Eduardo, I just took a look at that feature and, unless I've missed
:) something, it can't duplicate what I need to do. In Mozilla I can take
:) any message entry in my inbox and press 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 and the
:) line colour is changed to black, blue, red, etc. I use this to
:) prioritise mail as it comes in. It looks like Pine can only do it
:) according to a rule of some kind, which is no good for my needs at
:) work.

Right, Pine can not change the priority of a message on the fly, but you
can approximate it using a combination of keywords and scores. I will
assume that the number 0, 1, ..., 6 mean something, where you only change
from a lower number to a higher number,

First add the 7 keywords: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 to your list of keywords.

Set an indexcolor rule that works in term of keywords set
Keywords: 0, paint a color appropriate to keyword 0.
Keywords: 0,1 paint a color appropriate to keyword 1.
Keywords: 0,1,2 paint a color appropriate to keyword 2.
etc.

Draw back: you can not change from color 2 to color 1, unless you remove
the keywork 2, etc.

Guido Ostkamp

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Feb 25, 2006, 6:23:46 PM2/25/06
to
Hello Eduardo,

Eduardo Chappa <cha...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
> Right, Pine can not change the priority of a message on the fly, but
> you can approximate it using a combination of keywords and scores.

I think I once tried the keyword stuff earlier, but found that my
companies Exchange server which I access using IMAP refused the
necessary change to the mail needed for assigning a key.

Do you know anything about this kind of problem?

Regards,

Guido

Jonathan Sailor

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Feb 25, 2006, 10:44:56 PM2/25/06
to
I still use pine, and I wouldn't trade it for any other client. Why?
- Simple
- Powerful
- Usable anywhere I can ssh from (PDA, applet, real program, etc.)
- Can be run inside a screen session so I can resume it quickly
- Supports a lot (very good IMAP client, views/creates complicated MIME
messaes nicely, etc.)
- Fast (a few predictable keyboard commands per task)

What do I miss in other clients?
- Closer integration with sending/recieving mail (e.g. tracking
messages/threads across folders)
- Fast searching a la Spotlight in Apple's Mail.app
- Viewing attachments (occasional images) inline
- Real OpenPGP support

Just my $0.02,
Jonathan Sailor

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Big Brother wrote:

Eduardo Chappa

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Feb 25, 2006, 11:04:26 PM2/25/06
to
*** Guido Ostkamp (bagueltig-bi...@nurfuerspam.de.comm) wrote in...:

:) Eduardo Chappa <cha...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
:) > Right, Pine can not change the priority of a message on the fly, but
:) > you can approximate it using a combination of keywords and scores.
:)
:) I think I once tried the keyword stuff earlier, but found that my
:) companies Exchange server which I access using IMAP refused the
:) necessary change to the mail needed for assigning a key.
:)
:) Do you know anything about this kind of problem?

No, other than Keywords are optional. I checked one Exchange server I can
access and it does not support Keywords either, in fact, it does not
support threads either, so Pine has to download all the information it
needs to compute threads. Not nice :(.

Richard Steiner

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Feb 26, 2006, 12:44:32 AM2/26/06
to
Here in comp.mail.pine,
Big Brother <jo...@sdf.lonestar.org> spake unto us, saying:

>If they are who?

I use it from time to time under OS/2, Windows, and Linux because it
works well for the types of text e-mail I allow into my mailbox. :-)

At other times I use this client, Thunderbird, or a Horde-based web UI.

--
-Rich Steiner >>>---> http://www.visi.com/~rsteiner >>>---> Mableton, GA USA
OS/2 + eCS + Linux + Win95 + DOS + PC/GEOS + Executor = PC Hobbyist Heaven!
WARNING: I've seen FIELDATA FORTRAN V and I know how to use it!
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.

Peter C. Chapin

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Feb 26, 2006, 7:29:42 AM2/26/06
to
Eduardo Chappa <cha...@math.washington.edu> wrote in
news:Pine.LNX.4.64.06...@zeno1.math.washington.edu:

>:) Also... is there a raw message view option?
>
> Yes, press M S C and enable
>
> [X] enable-full-header-and-text
> [X] enable-full-header-cmd

Cool. Thanks.

Peter

Chris Lawrence

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Feb 26, 2006, 2:44:21 PM2/26/06
to
On Sat, 25 Feb 2006, Eduardo Chappa wrote:

> *** Chris Lawrence (bane...@holosys.co.uk.invalid.comm) wrote in...:
>
> :) Hi Eduardo, I just took a look at that feature and, unless I've missed
> :) something, it can't duplicate what I need to do. In Mozilla I can take
> :) any message entry in my inbox and press 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 and the
> :) line colour is changed to black, blue, red, etc. I use this to
> :) prioritise mail as it comes in. It looks like Pine can only do it
> :) according to a rule of some kind, which is no good for my needs at
> :) work.
>
> Right, Pine can not change the priority of a message on the fly, but you
> can approximate it using a combination of keywords and scores. I will

[...]

Thanks Eduardo, in fact I use the colours to indicate mail priority, so
for example red items are ones that I must deal with next, orange are
awaiting additional information, standard black are done or not
important and blue is information that I need to read but no action is
needed. The use of colours is simply how I deal with those actions in
Mozilla. I see that the use of keywords and perhaps some indexcolour
filtering will enable to me to add similar functionality to Pine. I'll
give it a blast and let you know how I get on.

--
Chris

Alan J. Flavell

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Feb 26, 2006, 3:39:36 PM2/26/06
to
On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Chris Lawrence wrote:

> Thanks Eduardo, in fact I use the colours to indicate mail priority,
> so for example red items are ones that I must deal with next, orange
> are awaiting additional information, standard black are done or not
> important and blue is information that I need to read but no action
> is needed. The use of colours is simply how I deal with those
> actions in Mozilla.

Eduardo has discussed this more on the basis of the "priority" being
a numeric quantity.

However, based on what you just said, it seems as if you may want to
define custom flags (in so far as they aren't already defined - there
is a standard flag "Important" already, which seems to match one of
your requirements).

You probably want to set the configuration options "enable-flag-cmd"
and "enable-flag-screen-implicitly" for convenience.

(We did establish, didn't we, that your IMAP server supports this?)

As already discussed, you can define index colouring rules to depict
your flag settings. It's slightly confusing in as much as rules
already exist for matching the pre-defined flags, but to match the
custom flags it seems one has to put the name of the custom flag on
the "Keyword pattern" line of the rule.

"Important" already does flag the index line with "*", but you can
colour it red too if you're happier with that.

This is a pretty similar idea to Eduardo's, but it doesn't use
numbers, and should be less confusing in regard to getting several of
them set. Of course you'll need to organise the rules in an
appropriate sequence so as to get the final colour you want if/when
more than one flag is set.

hope these ramblings are vaguely useful

Chris Lawrence

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Feb 26, 2006, 3:50:40 PM2/26/06
to
On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Chris Lawrence wrote:
>
> > Thanks Eduardo, in fact I use the colours to indicate mail priority,
> > so for example red items are ones that I must deal with next, orange
> > are awaiting additional information, standard black are done or not
> > important and blue is information that I need to read but no action
> > is needed. The use of colours is simply how I deal with those
> > actions in Mozilla.
>
> Eduardo has discussed this more on the basis of the "priority" being
> a numeric quantity.

That's why I wanted to look at it in more details, because Eduardo's
method doesn't seem to quite sit with my requirements (different notions
of priority) but it has inspired me to find out more about custom flags.

> (We did establish, didn't we, that your IMAP server supports this?)

I do not use these priorities on the IMAP mailbox because any mail in
there is high priority already. All other mail sits in my main mailbox
and is pulled down from a POP3 server. I intend to use a maildrop to
achieve this in PC-Pine, and am assuming that I can use custom flags on
local mail. Again, I've not looked into any of these features yet.

> As already discussed, you can define index colouring rules to depict
> your flag settings. It's slightly confusing in as much as rules
> already exist for matching the pre-defined flags, but to match the
> custom flags it seems one has to put the name of the custom flag on
> the "Keyword pattern" line of the rule.

I'll bear that in mind when I'm testing it, thanks.

> "Important" already does flag the index line with "*", but you can
> colour it red too if you're happier with that.

I'm not yet certain where Important comes from - whether it's a header
set by the sender or a local concept. In any case I have lots of
important mail which is not urgent and not a priority, so I don't wish
to confuse the two.

> This is a pretty similar idea to Eduardo's, but it doesn't use
> numbers, and should be less confusing in regard to getting several of
> them set. Of course you'll need to organise the rules in an
> appropriate sequence so as to get the final colour you want if/when
> more than one flag is set.
>
> hope these ramblings are vaguely useful

Yes, they are more in line with what I had in mind after a brief play
around yesterday. With Mozilla I simply make a judgement about the
priority of a mail and press the appropriate number to change its
colour. In an inbox with dozens of new mails per hour, it really helps
to be able to visually pick out the ones I'm working on. There's
nothing more formal that than going on really.

--
Chris

Guido Ostkamp

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Feb 26, 2006, 2:28:52 PM2/26/06
to
Eduardo Chappa <cha...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
> No, other than Keywords are optional. I checked one Exchange server
> I can access and it does not support Keywords either [...]

ok, too bad. I found some hints about 'stay-open' folders in the Pine
manual.

Do you think it would be possible to define a Pine rule for such an
Exchange-INBOX that automatically periodically moves all mail to a
local 'received' mailfolder on arrival while permanently staying in
this 'received' mailfolder all the time and deal with it as if it were
the real inbox?

This local 'received' folder would then surely be able to deal with
keywords.

Regards,

Guido

Alan J. Flavell

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Feb 26, 2006, 5:14:10 PM2/26/06
to
On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Chris Lawrence wrote:

> > "Important" already does flag the index line with "*", but you can
> > colour it red too if you're happier with that.
>
> I'm not yet certain where Important comes from

In regular PINE fashion, if you go to the Flags screen and type "?"
on the Important flag, you'll get its help text:

STATUS FLAG: Important

The Important flag, indicated by an asterisk in Pine's MESSAGE INDEX
screen, can only be set by the user, and is intended to be used in
whatever fashion makes sense to you. You are the only one that can
set or clear it.

> In any case I have lots of important mail which is not urgent and
> not a priority, so I don't wish to confuse the two.

It's entirely up to you what conventions you use - no arguments about
that...

The other predefined flags (New, Answered and Deleted), on the other
hand, of course aren't solely under your control ;-)

best regards

Chris Lawrence

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Feb 26, 2006, 6:10:21 PM2/26/06
to
On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Chris Lawrence wrote:
>
> > > "Important" already does flag the index line with "*", but you can
> > > colour it red too if you're happier with that.
> >
> > I'm not yet certain where Important comes from
>
> In regular PINE fashion, if you go to the Flags screen and type "?"
> on the Important flag, you'll get its help text:

Indeed, I'm aware of the online help (been using Pine for a long time)
but have yet to investigate the use of flags for the proposed client
switch, so I would have found this out in the next couple of days
anyway. My initial glance at flags suggests that I'll be defining some
specific ones and using the flags shortcut in everyday use.

--
Chris

Eduardo Chappa

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Feb 26, 2006, 6:52:39 PM2/26/06
to
*** Guido Ostkamp (bagueltig-bi...@nurfuerspam.de.comm) wrote in...:

:) Eduardo Chappa <cha...@math.washington.edu> wrote:

:) > No, other than Keywords are optional. I checked one Exchange server I
:) > can access and it does not support Keywords either [...]
:)
:) ok, too bad. I found some hints about 'stay-open' folders in the Pine
:) manual.
:)
:) Do you think it would be possible to define a Pine rule for such an
:) Exchange-INBOX that automatically periodically moves all mail to a
:) local 'received' mailfolder on arrival while permanently staying in
:) this 'received' mailfolder all the time and deal with it as if it were
:) the real inbox?

Yes, you can define a maildrop. I have information on how to set them up
in my web page at

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

Is that what you are thinking of?

:) This local 'received' folder would then surely be able to deal with
:) keywords.

Yes, I agree!!

Eduardo Chappa

unread,
Feb 26, 2006, 7:02:20 PM2/26/06
to
*** Alan J. Flavell (bafl...@physics.gla.ac.uk.comm) wrote in...:

:) On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Chris Lawrence wrote:
:)
:) > Thanks Eduardo, in fact I use the colours to indicate mail priority,
:) > so for example red items are ones that I must deal with next, orange
:) > are awaiting additional information, standard black are done or not
:) > important and blue is information that I need to read but no action
:) > is needed. The use of colours is simply how I deal with those
:) > actions in Mozilla.
:)
:) Eduardo has discussed this more on the basis of the "priority" being a
:) numeric quantity.
:)
:) However, based on what you just said, it seems as if you may want to
:) define custom flags (in so far as they aren't already defined - there
:) is a standard flag "Important" already, which seems to match one of
:) your requirements).

That's funny, that's not what I said. I know because I wrote it. I only
meant to say that one could associate "numbers" with "colors", in such a
way that changing numbers, changes colors, and I showed how to do it one
way, but also said that it only worked one way. I used the word priority
to make it clear that there is "one way".

I do not think that there exists functionality in Pine to go both ways,
neither through this method or others. There is no "replacement" in Pine,
which would be one way to do this.

Chris Lawrence

unread,
Feb 26, 2006, 8:39:14 PM2/26/06
to
On Sat, 25 Feb 2006, Eduardo Chappa wrote:

> *** Chris Lawrence (bane...@holosys.co.uk.invalid.comm) wrote in...:

Hmm just noticed that your Pine still adds this 'ba...comm' around the
attribution address.

> Right, Pine can not change the priority of a message on the fly, but you
> can approximate it using a combination of keywords and scores. I will
> assume that the number 0, 1, ..., 6 mean something, where you only change
> from a lower number to a higher number,
>
> First add the 7 keywords: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 to your list of keywords.
>
> Set an indexcolor rule that works in term of keywords set
> Keywords: 0, paint a color appropriate to keyword 0.
> Keywords: 0,1 paint a color appropriate to keyword 1.
> Keywords: 0,1,2 paint a color appropriate to keyword 2.
> etc.

I did it very similar and it works. I defined three new keywords - 1, 2
and 3. I turned on the shortcut flags options so I can take a message
and press *1, *2 or *3. I created three message index rules which
simply match keyword 1 for line colour red, keyword 2 for line colour
magenta and keyword 3 for line colour blue.

If I select a message in my mbox file and press, say, *1, the message
line is coloured red when I move the focus off the line.

I'm not sure why you suggested that to create the colour for keyword 2 I
needed to match keywords 0,1,2.

> Draw back: you can not change from color 2 to color 1, unless you remove
> the keywork 2, etc.

Yes, I assume this is governed by the order that the message index
filter rules are placed in? I had 1 as a rule called Priority 1 and if
this rule was acivated it overrode the results of Priority 2 or Priority
3.

Thanks again for helping, this is the first time I used this filter in
my years of Pine and it's useful (I tend to not use colours but the
ability to visually tag mail at work has been very useful).

--
Chris

Rob Brown

unread,
Feb 27, 2006, 10:52:07 AM2/27/06
to

That is pretty presumptuous of you. Given your German e-mail address,
and the amount and type of e-mail they generate, and the fact that
they don't read this newsgroup, I can state with near certainty that
my wife and kids have never heard of you, let alone complained to you.

:-P

Guido Ostkamp

unread,
Feb 27, 2006, 3:41:19 PM2/27/06
to
Eduardo Chappa <cha...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
> Yes, you can define a maildrop. I have information on how to set
> them up in my web page at
>
> http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/pine-info/maildrop/
>
> Is that what you are thinking of?

Thanks, Eduardo - that's exactly what I need; I updated to Pine 4.64
today to gain the additional shortcuts for assigning flags and changed
from regular INBOX to maildrop. It appears to be working.

There is however, another question I would like to ask.

I've been using regular mbox folders as of now, which can get very
large (up to a few thousand messages in global receive or sent
folders). It takes quite some time to open them. I have now put them
"stay-open" which greatly improved access time when switching between
folders.

However, I have found vague hints regardings other mailbox formats in
Pine's documents and some articles in the Internet, e.g. about an mbx
format used by UW-IMAPD, mh or maildir formats etc.

It appears that mbox is most compatible but slowest, mbx is a bit
faster for some operations and allows multiple-access and mh/maildir
is best in terms of performance, provided the underlying filesystem
works well for large chunks of small files (e.g. with reiserfs).

I tried mbx and indeed opening appeared faster, but deleting seems to
invoke the same slow rewriting of the message-box file as in mbox, so
I wanted to try mh/maildir.

However, I have been unable to setup an mh/maildir store with Pine. I
could nowhere in the Pine docs find any precise hint how to setup
this. Somewhere there was mentioning about some ".mh_profile" config
outside Pine, but all my tries only led to Pine error messages.

Do you have any hints?

I would like to setup a regular local folder collection (with
subfolders) in mh/maildir format on Linux. The INBOX is either IMAP or
local, but in standard mbox format (which should be kept).

Regards,

Guido

Guido Ostkamp

unread,
Feb 27, 2006, 3:48:23 PM2/27/06
to
Rob Brown <mylas...@gmcl.com> wrote:
> I can state with near certainty that my wife and kids have never
> heard of you, let alone complained to you.

Sorry, Rob. I didn't mean your wife & kids when using 'they' but all
Pine users - my mistake.

Regards,

Guido

Rob Brown

unread,
Feb 27, 2006, 7:07:53 PM2/27/06
to
On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Guido Ostkamp wrote:

> Sorry, Rob.

No problem. :-)

Howard Schwartz

unread,
Mar 11, 2006, 3:11:42 AM3/11/06
to
Big Brother <jo...@sdf.lonestar.org> wrote in
news:Pine.NEB.4.62.0...@otaku.freeshell.org:

> If they are who? I figure in the days of webmail, pop3, cell phones,
> black berry and whatever many would not be using Pine anymore. I still
> use it at times. Its very handy with old computers with dialup
> accounts in remote locations. In these environments webmail is simply
> out of the question.
>

Surprised to notice nobody in this long thread mentioned - uh -- security
(did I miss something?). Unlike most gui mail clients, pine contains no
scripting language that can used to ruin your PC, and other security
problems. And as an `older' not so well known client -- it tends to be
uninteresting as a target for viruses, spyware and so on.

In fact, I tend to use a kind of brute force strategy for avoiding PC
contamination -- I often use perfectly good `Old' programs, even (gasp)
on old OSes (e.g., dos, win 31) because they have probably been forgotten
by contemporary spammers, spy and virus programmers, etc.

----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
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Trevor Jenkins

unread,
Mar 11, 2006, 5:39:38 AM3/11/06
to
On Sat, 11 Mar 2006 02:11:42 -0600, Howard Schwartz <howardbs...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Surprised to notice nobody in this long thread mentioned - uh -- security
> (did I miss something?). Unlike most gui mail clients, pine contains no
> scripting language that can used to ruin your PC,

I mentioned this virtue in my posting along with praising the disregard of
URLs. Since the introduction of HTMLised email I've seen very few messages
whose content actually required the use of HTML. All (every single one) of
those where the content needed HTML have been spam. Long may pine keep us
from script languages and the automatic following of URLs.

Regards, Trevor

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