Pine Corupting Inbox

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Apr 21, 2008, at 12:53 PM, Chris Maness wrote:

> I think that pine is corrupting my inbox, so that it is unreadable  
> by UW-IMAPD.  When using squirrelmail after using pine I see the  
> headers, but squirrelmail is unable to open the e-mails.

When you read your mail with (al)pine with it picking up mail directly  
from /var/spool/mail, (al)pine will move the mail from /var/spool/mail  
into mailbox folders in your home directory.

Now normally, this puts the mail in a place where it can still be  
picked up by uw-imap server.  Indeed, under default configurations the  
uw-imap server will perform pretty much the same action when it gets  
new mail out of /var/spool/mail.  So when everything is working right,  
even reading the mail locally with pine shouldn't mess things up as  
they have for you.

>  I switched over to alpine since I do understand that pine is no  
> longer supported.  If other people have experienced this it would be  
> nice to have at least a notice when it is installed.  I have used  
> pine for almost 10 years without this problem, but maybe this is an  
> incompatability with a newer version of UW-IMAPD.

Here is what I would do to start diagnosing my first guess at the  
problem:

(1) Set up (or use) a clean vanilla user account, say fred.
(2) Send fred mail.
(3) log in as fred and have fred read mail with pine, with as close to  
a default configuration as possible.
(4) See if fred can see his mail via squirrelmail.  If so
(5) Look around ~/fred to find where pine put the mail.
(6) Compare the mail file locations for ~/fred and for you.
(7) If there are difference (which is what I'm expecting), then look  
through your .pinerc

Post back a report about how those steps go.  If things break at step  
4, then still do step (5) and report that back here.

Good luck.

Cheers,

-j


-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/