[ILUG] Pine inbox

[Brendan Kehoe]

> I use Pine on two boxes - one with Mandrake 5.3 with pine 4.04 and one
> with SuSE 6.3 and pine 4.10. 4.04 seems to use /var/spool/mail/niall as
> its inbox and to manipulate that e.g. if it deletes messages. 4.10 OTOH
> copies the messages into ~/mbox. Was that a version change or is it a
> configuration thing ? I've looked in both config files but I can't see the
> relevant difference.

I discovered this in /usr/doc/pine-4.10/tech-notes.txt:

-- cut --
   disable-these-drivers
   This variable is a list of mail drivers which will be disabled. The
   candidates for disabling are listed below. There may be more in the
   future if you compile Pine with a newer version of the c-client
   library.
   
     * mbox
     * mbx
     * mh
     * mmdf
     * mtx
     * mx
     * news
     * phile
     * tenex
     * unix
       
   The mbox driver enables the following behavior: if there is a file
   called mbox in your home directory, and if that file is either empty
   or in Unix mailbox format, then every time you open INBOX the mbox
   driver will automatically transfer mail from the system mail spool
   directory into the mbox file and delete it from the spool directory.
   If you disable the mbox driver, this will not happen.
   
   It is not recommended to disable the driver which supports the system
   default mailbox format. On most non-SCO systems, that driver is the
   unix driver. On most SCO systems, it is the mmdf driver. The system
   default driver may be configured to something else on your system;
   check with your system manager for additional information.
   
   It is most likely not very useful for you to disable any of the
   drivers other than possibly mbox. You could disable some of the others
   if you know for certain that you don't need them but the performance
   gain in doing so is very modest.
-- cut --

Hope this helps,
B

-- 
Brendan Kehoe

Web page: http://www.zen.org/~brendan/