Previous | Contents | Index |
The pine mail user agent developed at the University of Washington can read messages from the BSD mailbox, and it can also be used as an IMAP client or POP3 client to read messages from mailboxes on remote systems.
If only local mail is to be accessed (your BSD mailbox on the same system), no network connection is created, and no IMAP server or POP server is needed on the local system. If you have been using pine in this way you should continue to use it as always.
If you want to connect via pine to read mail files on a remote system, then there must be TCP/IP connectivity between your system where you are running pine and the remote system. The remote system must be running an IMAP daemon or server such as the PMDF IMAP server, or a POP daemon or server such as the PMDF POP server. 1
Pine is also an NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol, RFC 977) client, and can be used to read news from NNTP servers like the ANU News program or many common UNIX NNTP servers. Of course, you have to know the name of one such system before you can use this capability. Ask your system or network manager for help.
The pine view is that messages are stored in folders, and folders are stored in folder collections. Folder collections may be physically located on the local system, or on any remote system with an IMAP server. Regardless of what system a folder collection is physically located on, a pine user sees it as just another folder collection: a pine user can read messages in any of their folder collections and can save (move) messages between different folder collections. See Section 2.4.1 below for more details on folders and folder collections.
Or a read-and-delete-only pine folder can correspond to the "new messages" folder on a remote system with a POP3 server. (The POP3 protocol does not provide access to multiple folders---it only provides access to the "new" messages, usually those in a special "new" sort of folder. The POP3 protocol also does not allow for moving messages into a folder.)
2.4.1 Pine Folder Collections
A folder collection is a folder specification for a collection
of folders on one system. For example, it can be all of your UNIX mail
folders (mail files) on a system called foo.bar.com, or all of your
UNIX mail folders (mail files) whose names begin INFO-, or it can be
all of your VMS MAIL folders on a remote OpenVMS system. You can access
multiple different folder collections from within pine.
By default, pine knows only about the local folder collection,
corresponding to your BSD mailbox. The use of additional folder
collections is controlled by the folder-collections
option
in your pine resource file. Normally, this option is set from within
pine by using the SETUP
menu and then selecting the
L collectionList
menu. However, the option can also be set
by manually editing your pine resource file.
2.4.1.1 folder-collection Option Syntax
The setting of the folder-collections
option may be a list
of values, where each value specifies a folder or folders on the local
system or accessible via an IMAP server, or specifies the new mail
folder accessible via a POP3 server. Folders on the local system or
accessible via an IMAP server are specified using the format:
optional-label {imaphost}optional-file[view] |
optional-label {imaphost:port/user=username}optional-file[view] |
optional-label
is a label which will be displayed
by pine in place of the full name of the folder collection.
The optional field imaphost
is the name of a host
where the mail file resides. imaphost
may be any
system which has an IMAP server.
The optional port
specification may be included
if you want to connect to a port other than the default (for IMAP) of
143.
The optional username
may be included if you want
to log in to the imaphost
under a different
account name.
The optional field optional-file
is the file
specification of a mail file. If optional-file
is
omitted but imap-host
is specified, then the
default mail file on the remote imaphost
system
will be used. If neither optional-file
nor
imap-host
is specified, then your local default
mail file will be used.
When connecting to an IMAP server on a UNIX system, the
optional-file
part of the specification is
usually not used; instead, one simply specifies the mail folder(s)
(mail file(s)) to access by specifying them as the
view
part of the value.
When connecting to a OpenVMS based PMDF IMAP server, however, the
optional-file
part of the specification must have
the format
#disk:<directory>mailfile.mai# |
disk
, directory
, and
mailfile.mai
specify the full path, disk,
directory, and file name, to the mail file. For instance, to select the
mail file MEMOS.MAI
of DISK$USER1:[BOB]
, you
would specify
#DISK\$USER1:<BOB>MEMOS.MAI# |
Finally, the view
field controls which folders
from the mail file are part of the collection. If specified as being
empty, []
, then all folders from the mail file are treated
as part of the collection. Wild cards may be used to select folders
matching a pattern. For example, [INFO-*]
would select all
folders beginning with the string INFO-
from the mail
file. Again, note that folder names are considered to be case sensitive.
For POP3 access to a new mail folder on a remote system, the format is:
"foldername" {pop3host/POP3}INBOX |
"foldername" {pop3host/POP3/USER=username}INBOX |
foldername
is the name by which pine will
refer to the folder, pop3host
is the name of the
system running the POP3 server, and username
is
the name under which to log in to the remote POP3 server.
2.4.1.2 Example folder-collections Option Setting
An example of setting the folder-collections
option in
your pine resource file, normally .pinerc
, to a list of
several folder collections is:
folder-collections=local [], archive [/archive/mail], remoteVMS {vax.example.com}#DUA2:<JONES.MAIL>MAIL.MAI#[INFO*] remoteUNIX {sun.example.com}mail/[] |
~/archive/mail
; remoteVMS consists of all
folders whose name begin with INFO
in the mail file
DUA2:[JONES.MAIL]MAIL.MAI
on the remote host
vax.example.com; and remoteUNIX consists of all folders from the mail
directory mail/
on the remote system sun.example.com.
1 To find out more about IMAP, read
the IMAP4rev1 specification stored in the file
|
Previous | Next | Contents | Index |