Can you merge Pines?

I run two machines, mostly, with one of them serving mainly to back up the
other; and two more mainly just for looking at weather reports, and
anything else that need not interact with the apps I use constantly -- but
even those two of course do have pine on them; all of them, and also the
pine account on my wife's machine, which she doesn't use (She runs pine
on a remote ISP.), are configured to access the same ISP. (All five are
behind the same router. And I can ssh between them, if I want to bad
enough, by moving to the target and commanding for the nonce "service
iptables stop" ; I don't have a really proper LAN.)

So it happens at times, when I'm busy working on something on a machine
other than my usual one, that I jump into its pine account for some reason
-- often, in fact, to pass some little thing back and forth that I don't
want to do with scp. So I often also save a newly arrived message on
whatever machine it's on; I've made sure that pine doesn't delete from
server, and I don't drop a message out of my inbox till I'm sure I'm
through with it.

But that means that, for instance, no two of the GPS folders on five
different machines are related simply as set and proper subset. So I can't
simply scp all of my pine folders -- or even any one -- from one to
another without losing things.

I would like to clean up every few months, if there's a reasonably easy
way to do it, and reach stages where all my pine folders (not the same
list on each machine, but around a hundred folders) are the same.

Is there a way??

--
Beartooth Staffwright, Hunter by Birth,
Not Quite Clueless Fedora Power User
by God's Grace, Linux's and the Net's

Beartooth <beartooth@adelphia.net> wrote:

[snip]

> I would like to clean up every few months, if there's a reasonably easy
> way to do it, and reach stages where all my pine folders (not the same
> list on each machine, but around a hundred folders) are the same.
>
> Is there a way??

Use IMAP. Pine is an IMAP client, you know.

--
Stephen Chadfield
http://www.chadfield.com/

On Tue, 14 Mar 2006 01:14:13 +0000, Stephen Chadfield wrote:

> Beartooth <beartooth@adelphia.net> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> I would like to clean up every few months, if there's a reasonably easy
>> way to do it, and reach stages where all my pine folders (not the same
>> list on each machine, but around a hundred folders) are the same.
>>
>> Is there a way??
>
> Use IMAP. Pine is an IMAP client, you know.

Would someone please explain that in English, or refer me to a site with a
recipe? I *use* IMAP for preference -- very strong preference (though I
also run it against an ISP which is benighted enough to offer only pop3);
I don't *run* it (unless FC4 does without telling me), and have never
gotten around to learning anything more about it -- and more that I have
to learning vi or emacs, since I have pico.

--
Beartooth Staffwright, Hunter by Birth,
Not Quite Clueless Fedora Power User
by God's Grace, Linux's and the Net's

Sur 2006-03-15, Beartooth skribis:
> On Tue, 14 Mar 2006 01:14:13 +0000, Stephen Chadfield wrote:
>> Beartooth <beartooth@adelphia.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I would like to clean up every few months, if there's a
>>> reasonably easy way to do it, and reach stages where all my
>>> pine folders (not the same list on each machine, but around a
>>> hundred folders) are the same.
>>>
>>> Is there a way??
>>
>> Use IMAP. Pine is an IMAP client, you know.
>
> Would someone please explain that in English, or refer me to a
> site with a recipe? I *use* IMAP for preference -- very strong
> preference (though I also run it against an ISP which is
> benighted enough to offer only pop3); I don't *run* it (unless
> FC4 does without telling me), and have never gotten around to
> learning anything more about it -- and more that I have to
> learning vi or emacs, since I have pico.

Here's what I recommend (and do myself).

1. Get an IMAP service provider that offers at least 1 gig of
IMAP-accessible space, server-side filtering, backups &
restores, and a webmail that can do global searching of your
IMAP space.

2. Keep all your email on your IMAP service provider's system.

3. Set up Pine on all your systems, both your local desktop
systems and your remote systems, so that it accesses and manages
your mail on your IMAP service provider's system.

4. Set up your pinerc(s) and address book(s) so they reside on
your IMAP service provider's system.

5. Set up an alias or shortcut on every system where you run Pine
that looks something like this:

pine -p {your.imap.provider}remote-pinerc


Once you've done all this, you will be able to access and manage
all your mail from all your systems without needing to worry
about your mailboxes getting out of sync or spread around on
different machines. THIS is what IMAP is all about.

If you need more than a gig to store your mail, shop around. Disk
space is essentially free and infinite now. For example, my Verio
Signature account now includes 10 gigabytes (i.e., 10240000
bytes). If Verio is offering this, that means everyone will be
soon.

I hope this makes sense and I hope you can join the wonderful
world of IMAP!

Nancy

--
Nancy McGough ~ <http://www.ii.com> ~ <http://deflexion.com>

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:49:30 +0000, NM Public wrote:

> On 2006-03-15, I Beartooth [beartooth@adelphia.net] wrote inter alia :

>> Would someone please explain that in English, or refer me to a site
>> with a recipe? I *use* IMAP for preference [...]
>
> Here's what I recommend (and do myself).

[Aside: I'm honored to see Nancy her own self on this thread, and I hope
the following is not clear off topic; there may be several of us in the
same boat. And she will know if anybody does. -- btth]

> 1. Get an IMAP service provider that offers at least 1 gig of
> IMAP-accessible space, server-side filtering, backups & restores, and a
> webmail that can do global searching of your IMAP space.

OK, I have most of that, and can probably have the rest if I ask; I may
have it now and not know it. I know that Ddave (who owns the IMAP machine)
runs squirrelmail on his web interface; I use that at times against the
account there. I've asked him about server-side filtering and backups &
restores.

> 2. Keep all your email on your IMAP service provider's system.

I'd love to! I keep most of it there now. (Details below.)

> 3. Set up Pine on all your systems, both your local desktop systems and
> your remote systems, so that it accesses and manages your mail on your
> IMAP service provider's system.

Question: in what sense accesses and manages? I have two email accounts,
both of which I access from five machines. My good ISP, from whom I do get
IMAP and on whose linux machine I run Pine and do most of my email, is
remote -- three thousand-odd miles.

(Lest I cause confusion: heretically enough, I don't use Pine to read
comp.mail.pine -- or any other newsfeed. Despite my attachment to Pine for
email, I prefer to run Pan as my newsreader.)

The only broadband connection available where I live (and the account I
get my newsfeeds from, and thus use for c.m.p) is the POP3 one on cable --
which is also my only access to usenet, the Web, downloads, etc.

I can't get rid of that; if I did, I'd have no broadband at all. I doubt
that I can configure it in any significant way, either -- or anything else
on any machine at Adelphia. (More below.)

> 4. Set up your pinerc(s) and address book(s) so they reside on your IMAP
> service provider's system.

The ones for the IMAP account are there now; the ones for the local
account were originally cloned from them. (They may have diverged a
little.)

> 5. Set up an alias or shortcut on every system where you run Pine that
> looks something like this:
>
> pine -p {your.imap.provider}remote-pinerc
>
>
> Once you've done all this, you will be able to access and manage all
> your mail from all your systems without needing to worry about your
> mailboxes getting out of sync or spread around on different machines.
> THIS is what IMAP is all about.

Here's where I get confused. As things are now, each of the machines in
this house accesses the one same POP3 account directly -- using Pine in a
Gnome terminal -- and also accesses the one same IMAP account directly,
over a remote (ssh) connection. (One machine here does both about 99% of
the time, and the others do only occasionally -- mostly when I'm forced to
reboot the main machine to XP for something I can't yet run under linux.)

The trouble of course is with the POP3 account. Accessing the same
instance of Pine from several locations is indeed a great blessing.
Believe me, I do understand that part, and delight in it.

I *think* you're saying that I should arrange for the remote IMAP machine,
rather than any of my own machines directly, to access my POP3 account,
and then I would access it through the remote connection, instead of
directly, as I do now.

Is that right??

I would get my adelphia mail *through* the remote IMAP, and leave the
extant IMAP alone except for telling it about the additional mailserver.
Right??

And I would still keep both addresses, and know when I was working
in which?? (That detail is important, unfortunately.)

> If you need more than a gig to store your mail, shop around. Disk space
> is essentially free and infinite now. For example, my Verio Signature
> account now includes 10 gigabytes (i.e., 10240000 bytes). If Verio is
> offering this, that means everyone will be soon.
>
> I hope this makes sense and I hope you can join the wonderful world of
> IMAP!
>
> Nancy

Item 5 is the one I mainly want to follow up with questions :

> 5. Set up an alias or shortcut on every system where you run Pine that
> looks something like this:
>
> pine -p {your.imap.provider}remote-pinerc
>
[...]

Let me see if I have this straight. Is that a bash alias? I know where I
can get advice on those if I need it. Or is it some kind of alias inside
something else? And is it on each of my own machines? Or do I have to get
Adelphia The Eternally Accursed (which probably doesn't own a linux drive)
to put an alias on its machine somehow?

I think you're going to tell me I don't have to configure a thing at
Adelphia, or even tell them about it -- they wouldn't want to be bothered,
because it would make literally *no* difference to them? It sounds almost
too good to be true.

I hope this post isn't too mixed up; I really am finding yours, Nancy, a
such a revelation that I can hardly get my head around it, if it does mean
what I take it to. But I'm not at all surprised at the source.

--
Beartooth Staffwright, Hunter by Birth,
Not Quite Clueless Fedora Power User
by God's Grace, Linux's and the Net's

Before I try to answer your questions Beartooth, could you please
post your pinerc file(s), either here or on the Net somewhere
(and then post the URL here). I will use the information in it to
make a suggestion for how you can become an all IMAP all the time
person. This will probably involve using:

* a Pine maildrop folder to periodically automatically move your
POP3 mail to your IMAP server
* making sure that your IMAP server is your Pine "primary folder
collection"
* describe how to move your pinerc and address book to your IMAP
server
* give you a pine alias that you should put on all your machines
(local and remote) to launch pine

I use dial-up access too and it is not a problem. Pine is
excellent at dealing with IMAP over a slow connection.

Be aware that you will no longer have access to your mail when
you are disconnected. If this will not work for you, then let me
know now.

Thank you,
Nancy

--
Nancy McGough ~ <http://www.ii.com> ~ <http://deflexion.com>

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 07:27:46 +0000, NM Public wrote:

> Before I try to answer your questions Beartooth, could you please post
> your pinerc file(s), either here or on the Net somewhere (and then post
> the URL here). I will use the information in it to make a suggestion for
> how you can become an all IMAP all the time person.

I don't have a web site, and that seems a mighty long file; do you really
want the whole thing, or are there sizeable parts of it that I can excise?

> This will probably involve using:
>
> * a Pine maildrop folder to periodically automatically move your
> POP3 mail to your IMAP server
> * making sure that your IMAP server is your Pine "primary folder
> collection"
> * describe how to move your pinerc and address book to your IMAP
> server
> * give you a pine alias that you should put on all your machines
> (local and remote) to launch pine

I'm sure all the jargon is in your excellent FAQ; I'll start looking it
up.

> I use dial-up access too and it is not a problem. Pine is excellent at
> dealing with IMAP over a slow connection.

Pine is, yes, but I'm not.

It was probably a mistaken oversimplification on my part to describe
Ddave's machines at Lserv as my ISP; he runs a business, but not an ISP
business.

He lets me have an account there, behind his spam filters, out of the
goodness of his heart, because we first met on the old spam-L, 99% of
whose traffic was and remains beyond me, at a time when I had vast
bandwith. I could often forward spams to the list so fast that the far
more knowledgeable subscribers could alert the spammers' ISPs, and get
them shut down, while they were still spamming. We all took considerable
glee in that.

When I first retired, and discovered how inferior anything you could run
on Windows was (even PC-Pine imnsho), I soon found a second ISP,
radix.net, that ran linux; so I could telnet into it and run pine there.
(I'm the guy who took up linux, going on ten years ago, primarily to run
pine.) Then when my wife also retired and we moved, I found no such ISP
where we live now.

Meanwhile, telnet had become unsafe. So my only access to my real email is
over ssh: I couldn't use a phone modem even if I were willing (and I'm
not; even Adelphia is better than dialup, and I use the difference heavily).

> Be aware that you will no longer have access to your mail when you are
> disconnected. If this will not work for you, then let me know now.

<sigh> That sounds like a point that struck me in the night. There are
times when I get cut off from Lserv altogether, usually by some fault of
adelphia's, but sometimes by a problem on the other end. When that
happens, my recourse is to email Ddave from my adelphia account; so I need
to be able to keep my access to it, even if I seldom use it.

I bet that puts the kibosh on the whole thing, doesn't it?

--
Beartooth Staffwright, Hunter by Birth,
Not Quite Clueless Fedora Power User
by God's Grace, Linux's, and the Net's

Sur 2006-03-16, Beartooth skribis:
>
>> Be aware that you will no longer have access to your mail when
>> you are disconnected. If this will not work for you, then let
>> me know now.
>
> <sigh> That sounds like a point that struck me in the night.
> There are times when I get cut off from Lserv altogether,
> usually by some fault of adelphia's, but sometimes by a problem
> on the other end. When that happens, my recourse is to email
> Ddave from my adelphia account; so I need to be able to keep my
> access to it, even if I seldom use it.
>
> I bet that puts the kibosh on the whole thing, doesn't it?


Not necessarily. Which of the following are true:

1. [ ] Beartooth runs pine on his local computer.
2. [ ] Beartooth uses ssh to run pine on Dave's remote computer.
3. [ ] Beartooth uses ssh to run pine on X's remote computer.

From what you've written, I'm pretty sure that #2 is the case,
but what about #1 and #3 (where X is some other (non-Dave) remote
computer)? Please check all of the above that are true (e.g., for
me I would check all 3 of these (*)).

I'm trying to understand how you use Pine right now. This will
help me to understand if it makes sense for you to do what I was
thinking would be useful for you.

Also, can you ask Dave these 2 questions:

* What IMAP server is he running (e.g. Courier, Cyrus, Dovecot,
or UW)?

* What is the IMAP hierarchy separator (usually either '.', '/',
or '\')?

This will help me to help you set up the IMAP-accessible
configuration files.

Bye for now,
Nancy

(*) where 'Dave' is replaced by my friend 'John'!

--
Nancy McGough ~ <http://www.ii.com> ~ <http://deflexion.com>

Sur 2006-03-20, NM Public skribis:
>
> Also, can you ask Dave these 2 questions:
>
> * What IMAP server is he running (e.g. Courier, Cyrus, Dovecot, or UW)?
>
> * What is the IMAP hierarchy separator (usually either '.', '/', or '\')?

Beartooth - In addition to the above 2 questions, can you also
ask Ddave this:

* How much hard disk space can you, Beartooth, use on Ddave's
system to store IMAP mailboxes?

Thanks,
Nancy

--
Nancy McGough ~ <http://www.ii.com> ~ <http://deflexion.com>

On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 10:10:41 +0000, NM Public wrote:

> Sur 2006-03-16, Beartooth skribis:

>> I bet that puts the kibosh on the whole thing, doesn't it?
>
>
> Not necessarily. Which of the following are true:
>
> 1. [ ] Beartooth runs pine on his local computer. 2. [ ] Beartooth uses
> ssh to run pine on Dave's remote computer. 3. [ ] Beartooth uses ssh to
> run pine on X's remote computer.
>
> From what you've written, I'm pretty sure that #2 is the case, but what
> about #1 and #3 (where X is some other (non-Dave) remote computer)? Please
> check all of the above that are true (e.g., for me I would check all 3 of
> these (*)).

> (*) where 'Dave' is replaced by my friend 'John'!

#1 and #2, but not #3 -- and fwiw, #2 is also true of my wife. On rare
occasions, I call up my remote on a browser; I know that Ddave uses
squirrelmail, but not whether it runs on the same machine as my pine
account, or just connects to that.

> I'm trying to understand how you use Pine right now. This will help me to
> understand if it makes sense for you to do what I was thinking would be
> useful for you.
>
> Also, can you ask Dave these 2 questions:
>
> * What IMAP server is he running (e.g. Courier, Cyrus, Dovecot,
> or UW)?
>
> * What is the IMAP hierarchy separator (usually either '.', '/',
> or '\')?
>
> This will help me to help you set up the IMAP-accessible configuration
> files.

I'll forward your next, with the third added, to him. Thanks!

--
Beartooth Staffwright, Hunter by Birth,
Not Quite Clueless Fedora Power User
by God's Grace, Linux's, and the Net's