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Help for Alpine - Tip of the Day
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Tip of the Day
These tips were originally posted for Pine, but they are also useful
in Alpine.
Below is the current list of tips. In case you want to read more tips, Nancy
McGough keeps a list of more than 30
tips to speed Pine.
- Posted July 30, 2005
On a curious note. If you enable [X] spell-check-before-sending, pine will not
only check the spelling of the messages you send, but also the signatures you
create (either literal or not) from the Main Menu (by pressing S S).
- Posted July 29, 2005
If you read news from many servers, and you have enabled
[X] enable-multiple-newsrc, there are at least two ways to read a newsgroup
if you can access the target folder through an IMAP server:
- Using #move news.server local_folder, or
- using #move {proxy.imap}news.server {proxy.imap}local_folder
The main difference between the two definitions is that the former will
use a file called ~/.newsrc-news.server to store information between
accesses of the news group you are reading, while the latter will always
use your ~/.newsrc file to store such information. In particular, the
second definition is good if you are thinking of reading the same maildrop
from different computer machines with different ~/.pinerc files.
- Posted July 28, 2005
If you enable [X] enable-multiple-newsrc, then Pine will create a file
called ~/.newsrc-name.news.server to store the information on which
posts you have deleted. If your ISP, however, changes that server, by an
alias, Pine will not find the corresponding newsrc file and will read the
state of each newsgroup as new. To avoid this to happen enable
[X] mult-newsrc-hostnames-as-typed.
- Posted July 27, 2005
The UW-IMAP server allows access to newsgroups using the IMAP server as a
proxy server (so that you do not have to authenticate to the NNTP server,
if you are already logged in into the IMAP server, and the news server and
IMAP server know each other). This allows you to access a newsgroup as an
incoming folder by defining the server where such newsgroup is as the imap
server and the folder to open as the full path to the the nntp-folder. For
example, to read the newsgroup comp.mail.pine in the news server
news.server, through the imap server proxy.server, you would use the
format:
- Posted July 26, 2005
When you are in the index screen and press the
key, Pine will move to the next Unread or Important message in the folder.
You can make Pine search for unread messages only by enabling
- Posted July 25, 2005
Google offers POP3 access to its subscribers for reading your INBOX only.
However, the best way to access your INBOX is not by reading it as a POP3
folder, but instead as a maildrop. Add under
incoming folders
This will download all e-mail from your Gmail account to a folder in your
home directory.
- Posted July 24, 2005
If you have not enabled ,
then every time that you cancel a message, Pine (over)writes a file named
dead.letter that contains the text you were writing in the message before
you cancelled that message. You can make Pine create more dead.letter
files by setting the variable to the
maximum number of dead.letter files that you want created. Your
last cancelled message is always in the file dead.letter.
- Posted July 22, 2005
I normally filter e-mail from my INBOX to my incoming folders using
procmail, and save all my e-mail for those folders in that folder.
However, one can have mail moved from any particular incoming folder to a
saved-message-folder of your choice (so that only new mail be in that
folder). In order to set this up, from the main screen press , and define the option , as a list, where each line is
in the format (e.g.)
- Posted July 21, 2005
You can use a filter to make Pine archive messages from a specific sender
(e.g. your partner), in a specific folder, instead of the
. In this case, when you define the
filter you want to set, among other settings,
, which will match
only read messages (so only read messages will be moved, as is the case
with the feature.)
- Posted July 20, 2005
Pine can save all messages flagged read and not deleted when you
close the program. In order to set this, you must enable
and define the folder that
you will use to have those messages moved in the option
.
- Posted July 19, 2005
The periodic informational
post posted by Gopi Sundaram
contains answers to some frequently asked questions in comp.mail.pine.
- Posted July 18, 2005
You can use keywords to filter messages. An unexpected use of this feature
is that you can have a keyword called . You can
create a filter that changes the status of such messages to Unseen. This
combination will prevent that the message be removed from your inbox if
you have the auto-move-read-msgs feature enabled. In this way the message
will remain in your INBOX until you clear that keyword.
- Posted July 17, 2005
Keywords can not contain spaces in their definitions. If you add a space
to the definition of the keyword, it will be considered that all text
preceding the last space is a nickname for the keyword and the keyword
itself is the text following the last space. One can use this to give
nicknames to keywords, for example one can define a keyword as . In this case, a
message will be internally tagged as SpamAccordingToSpamAssassin, but you
will see it in the index screen or flag command, as tagged SAspam (which
is much shorter!).
- Posted July 16, 2005
The number of keywords that you can set on a message is server/folder
dependent. For example local folders in Pine and the UW-IMAP server accept
up to 32 keywords (other keywords are ignored).
- Posted July 15, 2005
Some people define keywords starting with the $ character. For example
$label1. The problem with this definition is that Pine will try to expand
this keyword as an environment variable, rather than interpreting it as
a keyword. If you want to have a keyword that starts with a $ character, you
must double the $ character (e.g $$label1) in its definition.
- Posted July 14, 2005
Not all IMAP servers, nor POP3 servers keep keywords, and some local
folders in some formats (e.g. MH, Maildir) neither do so. Having said
this, it is possible that your local format has been extended to support
keywords, but such extension is non-standard, so expect failures if you
use Pine with these type of folders.
- Posted July 13, 2005
Keywords (also known as labels) can be set on messages, in the same way that
you would set a normal flag (e.g. Answered, Deleted, etc.). You must
define the name of the Keywords you want to set first (e.g. "Answer Later",
or "Trip Related", or "Unfinished Business", etc.). You must define your
labels in the configuration option.
- Posted July 12, 2005
If you need to input 8-bit characters in your message, you must set your
character-set variable to a value different from US-ASCII.
- Posted July 11, 2005
The arrival date of a message to a folder (the date in which that message
was saved to the folder) is saved in Pine in the From separator line. If
you ever need to fix a folder, copying a From separator line from another
message destroys this type of information, so when you generate a From
separator line make sure you pay attention to these details.
- Posted July 10, 2005
The pipe "|" command in Pine has a few toggles. Each subcommand toggles
between two options. For example you can use the ^R command to toggle
between Raw or Processed text, which means that the pipe will receive the
message "as is", or how Pine displays it. You can capture the output of
the pipe and display that, or do not display it at all, and you can add
the From separator line or not (using the "with delimiter" toggle).
- Posted July 09, 2005
The unix driver is a format where all messages are saved in the same file
and are separated between them by a line which has a very specific format.
Such line begins with the string "From ". If you save a message, Pine will
add a leading quote to such lines unless they look
like a From separator line. If this causes problems for you, enable .
- Posted July 08, 2005
Sometimes Pine does not receive some commands you give it. For example,
you may press ^X and see nothing happen. This is because the command
is being intercepted before Pine receives it. If this is your case, try
pressing ESC ESC X. This applies to any Control command too.
- Posted July 07, 2005
If you set threads to be expanded by default and one of them is very long,
going to the first message of it may not be easy. One way to simplify this
process is by enabling . To go to the first message of the
thread, from the index screen put the cursor over any message in
the thread and press the forward slash key (/) twice.
- Posted July 06, 2005
Every time that Pine is run for the first time in a month, Pine will ask
you if you want to rename certain special folders, like sent-mail or
saved-messages. There are two ways to avoid being asked this question:
- You can set the variable
to a big value, like
999.12 (which means ask me again on January of the year 2900), or
- You can set the variable
to the value no-no, which means
do not ask me again about these folders and do not rename
such folders every month.
- Posted July 05, 2005
You can save a message to a non existing folder in a non existing directory.
If any of the folders or directories in the path of the folder do not
exist, Pine will create them for you.
- Posted July 04, 2005
Checks for new mail occur every certain number of seconds, which is
determined by the value of the variable . If you quit Pine in between checks,
it is possible that you do not see new mail that just arrived after the
last check. To avoid this possibility enable .
- Posted July 03, 2005
If you read newsgroups or mailing lists from gmane.org, you will see that
all their newsgroups begin with the string "gmane". You can make that
string disappear (and hence have a cleaner display) if you define the
Path: field in the definition of the collection as "" instead of "".
- Posted July 02, 2005
Filters can not check for all possible values in headers (e.g. empty
headers), or can not be used to check for certain properties of the
message (e.g. the message has a size smaller than 30K). For this kind of
tests, use the categorizer command in the filter, which is simply a path to
a script/command that you will use to determine if the filter applies to
the message. The test is successful if the external command returns an
exit value in a predetermined range, set in the filter.
See also: Using External Commands to Filter Messages.
- Posted July 01, 2005
If you subscribe to a newsgroup that has a big volume of posts, chances
are Pine will take a long time to open it. This is specially true if you
are using a dial-up connection to your ISP. If you see a big delay in Pine
when it opens big newsgroups, you should set to the maximum number of posts you want Pine
to download in a session (e.g. 400 or a smaller value).
- Posted June 30, 2005
One can manually edit many of the configurations options in Pine, directly
from the .pinerc file. When you do this, keep in mind that options whose
values are lists (like alt-addresses), must list values on one line per
value and ended in a comma, except by the last value which should not have
a trailing comma.
If you wish to remove a value from a list, precede the line that contains
such value with a character and move it to the last
line of the list, keeping in mind the format of the above paragraph.
- Posted June 29, 2005
If Pine takes a long time to open your INBOX it may be due to a timeout
(an amount of time that passes before an operation gets cancelled). If
this is your case, you may want to set certain timeouts to zero. For
example, set and to 0 (zero).
- Posted June 27, 2005
You can test Pine against many IMAP servers in your local machine,
without the need to install
such servers. You can do so by defining the inbox-path to point to
{name.local.machine}inbox and make the rsh-path point to the
/full/path/to/imapd (this requires, of course, that you do not disable rsh,
which means that must be different
from zero).
- Posted June 24, 2005
If you access a remote pinerc or addressbook you will see that Pine keeps
a number of old copies of such files as if they were e-mail messages in a
folder. The number of copies of such file that are kept can be controlled
by the variable in your .pinerc
and it defaults to 3 copies.
- Posted June 23, 2005
The goto command allows you to open folders or
newsgroups that are not listed in any collection. You can use this trick
to open a remote addressbook or pinerc file by entering . You can use this to
remove unwanted copies of addressbooks or configuration files that you do
not want.
- Posted June 22, 2005
You can save your .pinerc file in an IMAP server. This is useful if you access
Pine on different machines and you want to use similar configurations in
all of them. You can use Pine to save your .pinerc file in an IMAP server
by pressing from the main screen.
- Posted June 21, 2005
In PC-Pine you can specify a color as a combination of red, green and
blue. All you need to remember are the codes for
"red = 256,0,0",
"green = 0,256,0", and
"blue = 0,0,256".
With those values you can create new
colors, for example
"white
= red + green + blue = 256, 256, 256", "black =
0,0,0", etc.
- Posted June 20, 2005
When you delete an entry in your address book, it is not actually removed
from it, but it is moved to the top of the file and commented out by
adding a pound sign at the beginning of the line. This
is useful if you remove an entry by mistake and later want to recover it. In
this case simply remove the sign in front of the line
that you want to recover.
- Posted June 19, 2005
Copying folders between collections can be done using the
and commands in the
folder collections. Here's how:
- From the folder list screen "Export" the folder you want to copy (to
file "foo").
- Create the destination folder in the other collection (say folder
"bar").
- From the folder list screen, put the cursor over folder "bar" and
"Import" (use the "U" command) the file "foo".
- Posted June 18, 2005
You can use environment variables in your roles or filters in general. In
order to make Pine know the exact name of the environment variable, you
must enclose it between braces. For example you can write the environment
variable . If you write , the filter will disappear and will not be
editable, nor selectable again.
- Posted June 17, 2005
When you close an incoming folder, chances are it was not closed. When a folder
is remote, the connection is possibly kept alive (and the folder open) even
if you are not in that folder. This is done to minimize the cost of opening
a folder, because this process is considered expensive. Due to this behavior,
you may find that the next time that you open a folder, a few new messages
that you had not seen before are marked unseen, or that the key will not find new messages in such folder, even though, in
your opinion there are new messages in such folder. In order to minimize
this latter inconvenience, enable
.
- Posted June 16, 2005
Every field that is displayed in the index screen when you open a folder is
controlled by a token which must be entered in the index-format configuration
option. The token has four codes for the status
of a message, which allow you to differentiate between new and old messages.
They are:
- for messages that are new to the folder.
- for messages that are new to the folder, but you
just read.
- for messages that are old but have not been read or were read but flagged unseen.
- (a blank space) for messages that are old, but have been read.
People find that IMAPSTATUS looks strange, but everyone gets quickly accostumed
to the new look and greater amount of information you get.
- Posted June 15, 2005
The default configuration of Pine makes you think that any message marked
with an in the index is "New". An
flag means that either the message is new in the folder (it was not there
the last time the folder was closed), or the message is unseen (the message
was in the folder the last time it was closed, but the message had not been
read or had been read but flagged unseen).
- Posted May 31, 2005
The default in Pine is that all messages will be sent with content-type
set to flowed. Sometimes this creates problems, because in flowed text it
is easy to break formatting of the message. For example, a table may not
look right at the receiving end, even though it displays well for you
before you send it. To make sure that your messages preserves formatting
you have three choices:
- disable flowed text completely. This is done by enabling
, or
- make sure that when you send the message, the message is not sent as a
flowed message. This is done when you press to send
the message. In this case, there will be a menu in the bottom which includes
the command, which is the key you need to press, or
- Make sure that the lines that
need to preserve the original formatting are fixed. This means that the
last character in each of those lines in a space.
See also: Information on flowed text support in Pine.
- Posted May 30, 2005
If you keep files for your "green and red lists"
(or if you prefer, "white and black lists"), you can use Pine to add
entries to that file. First enable
. Now every time that you see
and address that you want to add to a file, press the
command in the index screen while the cursor
is over the message whose addresses you want to add, and select
to export addresses. Pine will give you a screen
which lists addresses that you can export to the desired file. The said
address will be appended at the end of the file, keeping the format of only
one address per line.
- Posted May 29, 2005
If you receive an e-mail message as an attachment, Pine does not let you
reply to the message in the attachment. However once the message that
contains the attachment is open, you can press to go
to the list of attachments, put the cursor over the attachment that
contains the message you want to reply and press to
reply to the message.
- Posted May 28, 2005
Using a password file is a great way to speed login into a mailbox. The
only drawback is that you may forget your password. If this is your case,
you can recover your password by running Pine with the command . Your password will be recorded in the
debug file. This requires that Pine be compiled with
debug support, which is the default in the compilation of Pine.
- Posted May 27, 2005
If you use ispell or aspell as your speller, make sure that you call it with
the option , which avoids that the speller will leave
backup files in the /tmp directory.
- Posted May 26, 2005
The arrival time of a message in a folder is the time when the message was
saved in that folder, so when you copy messages between folders, this internal
date is modified, therefore when you transfer messages between folders it is
better
if you sort the original folder by Arrival, to preserve at least the arrival
order, even though the arrival date will be lost.
- Posted May 25, 2005
The explanation of what all available commands in a screen do can be obtained
by pressing or .
- Posted May 24, 2005
Neither the , nor the
configurations allow you to write many options for the program you will use.
If you need to specify lots of options, make your editor, or speller a script
that calls the program you will want to open. The script can contain all
the options you need.
- Posted May 23, 2005
When you attach a file in Pine you can use the
key to complete the name of the attachment. To do this, put the cursor
in the headers section of the message and press . Pine
will ask you for a file name to attach. While entering the name of the
file, press the to see if Pine can find a unique
file containing the string you have entered, and in that case it will use
that name for the file to attach.
- Posted May 22, 2005
If you have incoming folders in different IMAP servers, you may want to
preopen at least one folder in each server, and set the number of remote
connections equal to the number of incoming folders. In this way
operations like opening remote folders, or checking for new mail with the
key will be faster, since Pine will not have to
open a connection to the server, but will reuse an old connection to one
of the preopen folders.
- Posted May 21, 2005
Pine asks you every month if you want to archive your default fcc
and read-messages folders. You can have Pine do this automatically, or not do it at all. In
order to determine what to do every time Pine is run for the first time of the
month, from the Main Screen press and set up the value
of the variable .
- Posted May 20, 2005
You can use environment variables to define the value of a configuration
option. For example, one can define the inbox-path variable to be , where
LOGNAME is a variable which the system assigns upon startup which contains
the username of your account. Environment variables are only expanded when
you start Pine, so if the environment variable changes its value while
Pine is being executed, it will not be seen by Pine.
- Posted May 19, 2005
If you are having problems with a message in Pine, and the folder where
the message is located is in an IMAP server, first save the message to
a local folder. If the problem disappears then it is likely that the
problem is related to the external server. If the problem persists it is
very likely to be a problem with Pine and you should report it to one of
the public forums, like the pine-info mailing list or comp.mail.pine.
- Posted May 18, 2005
There are two dates associated to a message, one of them is always visible
and it is the date in the Date: header of the message. The other one is an
invisible date, which is the date when the message was saved into the
folder, this date is the date. For messages in
your inbox those two dates are probably close, but if you save this
message to another folder, then in that folder the arrival date will be
the date that you saved it into that folder, while the other date (in the
Date: header) will remain intact.
Pine allows you to select messages (using the
command) based on these two dates, the date in the Date: header is called
the date, while the other is called the date.
- Posted May 17, 2005
Tranferring folders using (s)ftp is always a bad idea. The transfer of
files may damage a folder, making it unreadable. If your folders are
located in a collection under an IMAP server, you should try to use
aggregate operations to save such messages to some other folder. For more
information on how to copy several messages between folders at the same
time see this tip.
- Posted May 16, 2005
Starting on version 4.63 Pine allows you to read quoted messages so that
no spaces between quote strings are printed, printing longer lines of text
in the screen. This can be done by setting the variable to the value (this means two double
quotes enclosing a bigger than sign, followed by a space, and another
double quotes enclosing a space). You may also want to enable .
- Posted May 15, 2005
The command can be used in an Incoming-Folders
collection to check which folders contain new mail. If, in addition, you
prefer to check for folders that contain either new or unseen e-mail
simply enable .
See also: Information on the Incoming Folders Collection.
- Posted May 14, 2005
Applying a display filter to a message will destroy coloring of different
levels of quotes, unless you enable .
- Posted May 13, 2005
If you ever post to Usenet and for any reason your post contain accents
or in general "8 bits" characters, Pine will post a message which will
be unreadable in some newsreaders. To fix this problem enable
.
- Posted May 12, 2005
You can attach several messages at the same time, as long as they are in
the same directory. To do this, put the cursor over the field in the headers section of the message that
you are composing and press . This will bring a list
of files which you can use to attach. After navigating to the correct
directory, press to enter in List mode. Select each
file you want by pressing the command next to each
file and finally when you have selected all required files, press to include them in the attachment list.
- Posted May 11, 2005
The feature controls what
happens when you press the mouse buttons in the screen. If enabled, you
will be able to execute commands in Pine by clicking in the menu in the
bottom of the screen. In this case, copying and pasting with the mouse is
done as usual, but you need to press the shift key simultaneously with the
left and middle buttons of the mouse. If you do not want to execute
commands with the mouse you can keep this feature disabled and in that
case copying and pasting is done as usual, by using the left and middle
buttons of the mouse.
- Posted May 10, 2005
You can delete selected attachments of a message. Open the message and press
. Put the cursor over any attachment that you want to
delete and press . Now go back to reading the message, and
save the message, to the same folder (or to other folder). The saved message
will not contain the deleted attachments.
- Posted May 09, 2005
Even if there is no space between the quote string and the text, you can add
one to make text easier to read. Set the
option either to
or
.
- Posted May 08, 2005
If a status message that Pine prints in the screen disappears too quickly, you
can read it in the journal, which can be reached by pressing
from the Main Screen. You can use this to read
detailed execution information in the debug, by changing the debug level
once you are in the journal screen.
- Posted May 07, 2005
You can copy all messages between two folders, by using the
command. Simply enable
and use the command
and enter the name of the folder where you want to
copy all the messages. Observe that there are many more options available
in the menu after you press the command.
- Posted May 06, 2005
If you receive several attachments, you can save them all at once. In order
to do so, open the message as if you were going to read it, and press
to export the message. You will see a menu in the bottom,
which should have a command. If it does,
simply press . Pine will save the message to a file
with any name you want (e.g.: foo), and save the attachments to a directory
whose name is obtained from the name of the file containing your message
with extension "d" (e.g. foo.d).
- Posted May 05, 2005
The fact that Pine looks the same despite of its version number is a myth.
Sometimes Pine changes its behavior from well established old behavior. If you
find that this is the case, or you want to know which changes affected the
current version of Pine, simply read the Release Notes, which can be found
from the Main Menu by pressing .
- Posted May 04, 2005
If you go to the screen, you can change your in two ways. One is to press over that variable and answer each question as
appears. The other one is to enter (at the first question) the full path
to your inbox. For example you could enter , at that prompt. This
works even if you define your INBOX as a maildrop.
- Posted May 03, 2005
To create a directory in a local collection, press
and add the name of the directory to be created.
To create the folder in the directory
, simply enter as the name
of the folder. In the event that the directoy does not
exist, Pine will create it for you.
- Posted May 02, 2005
Everyone sees your names in your posts to a newsgroup, even if you see
them as . Pine shows where you
posted instead of your name. You can change this behavior by going to the
main screen and pressing , and in the changed the definition of the token to .
See the help text for the index-format variable for details on how to make
this change.
- Posted May 01, 2005
If you receive a message which contains quoted text, you reply to it, you
have not disabled flowed-text support, and you use a normal quote string
like , then Pine will send your message
using flowed text.
If the original messages was not in flowed text, then the quoted
text will not be transformed to flowed text by Pine, unless you justify it.
This defeats a little bit the purpose of flowed text, so always justify
the full message that you are sending. This can be done with the command
, or in a paragraph by paragraph basis using the
command.
See also: Patch that allows you to justify quoted text under different quotes
- Posted April 30, 2005
If your version of Pine creates debug files, these are created with debug
level defaulting to the number 2. If you need to change the debug level while
you are running Pine, you can do so by going to the Main Screen and
pressing the number that you would like to set the new debug level. For
example, pressing the number 5 will set the debug level to 5.
- Posted April 29, 2005
Starting in version 4.63, a new command to reprocess filters is available.
If you want your filters to run at a particular time while you are in the
folder, press .
- Posted April 28, 2005
The and keys of your
keyboard can be used to scroll to the top or bottom of the screen
respectively. For example in the index screen, the key scrolls to the page containing the first message
in the folder, and the key scrolls to the last
message in the folder. If you are reading a message, the key scrolls to the headers of the messages, while
the key scrolls to the last page of the message.
This can also be done (in this a other screens by pressing to go to the top and to go
to the bottom of the screen).
- Posted April 27, 2005
There is a nice bug in Pine, which can be exploited to your advantage. The
command can be used to go fast to your INBOX
folder. This was explained in this tip. If you have
multiple collections, then the trick
to return to the same mailbox may not work if you are trying to return to
a folder in the incoming-folders collection, since Pine naturally tries to
return to INBOX. In this case, changing the collection and returning to it
(by pressing the and
arrow keys) will reset the default folder to go, from INBOX to the last
folder you opened in the incoming-folders collections, which is probably
what you want to happen.
- Posted April 26, 2005
If a configuration value appears twice in your .pinerc, Pine will use the
last value that it finds. Make sure you always remove duplicate values from your
.pinerc file. To get a fresh start use the command
.
- Posted April 25, 2005
If you are having problems because Pine was built with the old maildir
patch and you do not use maildirs, you can disable such support by adding
in your .pinerc.
See also: New maildir patch
- Posted April 24, 2005
If you do not have much space to build Pine in your own account, you can
reduce the amount of space needed to build by doing the following:
- Remove the directories docs/ contrib/, imap/docs, packages/
- Remove all directories under imap/src/osdep that you will not use.
If you are building under linux, just keep the unix/ directory.
- Wait until Pine has built the c-client library. Get into that directory
and remove all *.o files.
- Wait until the script has built Pico and go into the Pico directory, remove
all *.o and *.c files.
- Wait until Pine's compilation has built pine.c and go to the C-client
directory and remove all *.c files. You can also remove all files in the
mailutil/, imapd/ ipopd/ and mtest/ directories.
- After Pine is built execute the command "strip pine" to reduce the
size of the executable and copy it into your account, now you can remove
the total directory that contains the source code of Pine.
This requires only 30MB to build Pine, and it can be pushed down even
farther.
- Posted April 23, 2005
If you do not want to be asked about pruning folders each month, press
in the Main Screen and set the value of the option
. I set it
up as , and use environment
variables to control
creation and pruning of these.
- Posted April 22, 2005
If in the folder list screen you see a name of a folder followed by the
string or , it means that
that name refers to a directory and a folder. To open the folder press
, and to open the directory press
. If you find that listing folders this way is
confusing, consider enabling
.
- Posted April 21, 2005
If you are editing your configurations and you add a comma in the value of
an option that contains several values (like customized-hdrs), then Pine
will split the line you entered into two or more lines, where the comma
was placed. To avoid this, enclose the full value of that option in double
quotes, as in: .
- Posted April 20, 2005
If Pine is using your local mbox file to move messages from /var/spool/mail
to it, you can stop this behavior by adding
to your .pinerc. In case you
are having problems with the old maildir patch and you do not use maildir,
simply add there too.
See also: Compiling Alpine and the mbox driver
- Posted April 19, 2005
If you want to reopen a mailbox to check its new status (like a POP3 folder,
or a newsgroup, or a closed connection to a remote IMAP server, press
. What will happen next will depend on the value
of the configuration option .
- Posted April 18, 2005
Never make a remote POP3 folder your INBOX. Pine never checks if new e-mail has
arrived to a POP3 folder while it was opened. It is always better to add
a remote POP3 folder as an incoming folder, since reopening the folder will
always show you all new mail that has arrived (to do the same in INBOX you
would have to close Pine).
See also: The Incoming Folders Collection
- Posted April 17, 2005
Organize all your incoming folders so that those that are in the same server
are next to each other in the listing. When this is done this way, and
you press to check for new mail in one of them, the
same connection is used to check for all folders in that server. If you
don't do this, then Pine will close the connection to that server when it
will open a connection to a new one, which slows down the check. (Opening
secure remote connections is considered expensive compared to checking for
new mail in an already opened connection).
- Posted April 16, 2005
If you want more space for the subject in the index screen, you could
eliminate the message number field from the display by reconfiguring the
index-format variable. The number of the message that you are seeing
is always at the top of the screen.
See also: The Index Screen
- Posted April 15, 2005
The fastest way to get to your INBOX from any folder is by pressing
. The command allows you
to go to any folder, but unless you have changed your
, this defaults to INBOX. You can return
to the last folder you were in by pressing
again.
- Posted April 14, 2005
In order to know how many new messages there are in an incoming folder,
put the cursor over that folder (in the FOLDER LIST screen) and press the
key. This requires that you enable
. This does not work in the
Mail/ collection or in newsgroups.
See also:
Patch to check new mail in incoming folders
- Posted April 13, 2005
If while you are composing a message using Pico a new message arrives,
Pine will notify you and the notification will remain there for a long
period of time. If you wish to make such notification disappear press
twice.
- Posted April 12, 2005
You can send a link to a local file over e-mail, by using the
file:// resource locator. For example
file:///etc/pine.conf may be a link to the file /etc/pine.conf.
- Posted April 11, 2005
If you change your From: field to be a different e-mail address to the
default one, add your new address to the
configuration option. This will avoid Pine including your address in a reply,
and will make Pine show the index correctly in folders like sent-mail.
- Posted April 10, 2005
If you can read news from more than one server, try enabling , and if you can post to more
than one server try enabling .
- Posted April 09, 2005
If you use a screen with a margin that is too wide, it is more convenient
to set to a value like 74c than to
its default. The default makes Pine print characters up to 4 characters
before the margin; a value of 74c makes Pine print characters up the 74
column.
- Posted April 08, 2005
If you receive an attachment of type text, and Pine does not realize about it,
you can see it, before you save it, by opening the message, pressing
, and entering . This process
is called and requires that you enable
.
- Posted April 07, 2005
If you are tired of pressing to compose a message
and answer too many questions before you can start composing a message,
simply enable . A new message
is always away.
- Posted April 06, 2005
If you want to process or filter the body of the message that you are
composing in Pico, without sending the message,
make the command a script that can call the filter, instead of making
it just call the speller.
- Posted April 05, 2005
You can edit any configuration option from the configuration screen (press
M S C to get there) and make sure you enable
. The next time you get to that screen all hidden
options will be visible.
- Posted April 04, 2005
If Pine has problems connecting to a server and becomes unresponsive with a
message , edit
your .pinerc file and change the value of
to a small value.
This will make Pine respond faster.