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Maildir patch for Alpine
Patch is available for version: alpine 1.00 alpine 1.10 alpine 2.00 alpine 2.01 alpine 2.10 alpine 2.11 alpine 2.20 alpine 2.21 alpine 2.22 alpine 2.23 alpine 2.24 alpine 2.25 alpine 2.26
 
This is the update of a similar patch for Pine, and is configured similarly.
 
If you have already built Alpine before you apply this patch, you need to execute the command "make clean" in the source code of Alpine. This is done to make sure that the scripts that are executed at the beginning of the compilation create the necessary links needed for compilation. If you just unpacked Alpine you can just apply this patch and build as you normally would. There are no extra configurations for this patch that can be set from the configure script.
 
I have added support for the Courier/Cyrus/Dovecot file system, read the configuration instructions.
 
If you are interested, you can read the list of the latest updates to this patch. Here is the way of using this patch.
  • This patch assumes that your INBOX is located at "$HOME/Maildir". This is a directory which should have three subdirectories "cur", "tmp" and "new". If you read maildir from another directory in your $HOME directory (e.g. .maildir), then set the variable maildir-location to reflect this fact (e.g. maildir-location=.maildir). This is the best way to change the path of the inbox. Set Inbox Path = #md/INBOX.
  • You can create a collection of folders which are in maildir format. In order to do that press M S L and add the following data:
     
    Nickname: Anything, your choice
    Server:
    Path: #md/relative/path/to/home
    View:

     
    Observe that in a maildir collection you can only have maildir format folders, folders in another format are ignored. This helps Alpine ignore other files that are part of configuration of other servers (e.g. Cyrus, Courier). Folders in a maildir collection are created in the maildir format. Folders in any other collection are created in the format defined when building Alpine (normally unix or mbox format, which is a default that is not changed by this patch).
     
    It was noted by Jonathan Johnson that if you add the line
     
    folder-collections=Mail #md/Maildir/[]
     
    to the global Alpinerc file (normally in /usr/lib/pine.conf or in /etc/pine.conf), then your users will be able to use Maildir as their default format.
  • You can use your mail/ collection to store Maildir style folder. If you want to add a maildir folder called foo to your mail/ collection make sure that you are in the folder list screen and press A, then enter
     
    #driver.md/mail/foo
     
    You can have all types of folders in your mail/ collection, including Maildir format. In other words, this patch allows you to have both worlds under the same collection, or you can have a collection of only maildir folders.
  • Here are directions on how to convert a mailbox from any format (supported by Alpine) to maildir format.
    1. Not Using Alpine After building Alpine with this patch, use the mailutil program. For example assume that you added a collection of Maildir folders in the above step that is located in the "Mdir" directory, then in order to transform your saved-messages folder into Maildir format you would execute a command like:
       
      mailutil copy ~/mail/saved-messages #driver.md/Mdir/saved-messages
       
      This command will create a folder called saved-messages in the Mdir collection. In particular it is assumed that that folder does not exist. If you want to append messages to a maildir folder, foo in the Mdir collection use the command
       
      mailutil append ~/mail/saved-messages #driver.md/Mdir/foo
       
      Finally if you want to create a Maildir folder called bar in the Mdir collection use the command:
       
      mailutil create #driver.md/Mdir/bar
       
    2. Using Alpine Use aggregate operations as you normally would to tranfer messages between folders.
  • The internal name (for Alpine) of this driver is md, not maildir. In particular, this also means that if you need to disable this driver for any reason, you have to use the command
     
    disable-these-drivers=md
     
    Hopefully you will never have to do this.
     
    If you intend to use this patch in Cygwin notice that the separator character used in Maildir was changed from ':' (a colon) to ';' (a semicolon). Configure your Mail Delivery Agent (e.g Exim) to use such character when delivering to a Maildir folder.
     
    Please send me all feedback you have about the patch so that it can be improved in later versions.
     
    Thanks

Last Updated 17:50:10 MST Sun Dec 24 2023.