!shiva2.cac.washington.edu!skramer
Subject: PINE - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 13:12:03 -0700

Archive-name: mail/pine-faq
Posting-Frequency: monthly
URL: http://www.washington.edu/pine/QandA/FAQs.html

   The most
   
Frequently Asked Questions about Pine

  What documentation is available for Pine?
  
   The Pine program itself includes extensive internal, context-sensitive
   help. Additional information, including a User's Guide, Technical
   Notes, Questions & Answers, where to obtain the Pine software, what
   tools are available to perform tasks that Pine itself does not, and
   more, can be accessed:
     * In the Pine Information Center on the World Wide Web at the URL:
       http://www.washington.edu/pine/
     * Via anonymous FTP on the host ftp.cac.washington.edu in the
       subdirectory /pine/docs/. Here, you will find most of the
       documents from the Pine Information Center in plain-text form.
     * The Pine documents on the host ftp.cac.washington.edu can also be
       read from within Pine by defining a folder collection (from Pine's
       MAIN MENU, choose SETUP, Config; then move to folder-collections
       and choose Add Value) as:
       *{ftp.cac.washington.edu/anonymous}pine/docs/[]
       
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  Who should I ask for help with Pine?
  
   If you need assistance with Pine, contact the technical support staff
   or computer help desk of your Internet Service Provider, school,
   university, employer, ... -- whichever organization provided you with
   the email account on which you are using Pine. (Due to the large
   number of Pine installations worldwide, the University of Washington
   cannot provide individual support services to Pine users at other
   organizations.)
   
   You may also be able to find the answer to your question through the
   Pine Discussion Forum -- see http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/
     * If you are posting a question to the Pine Discussion Forum but do
       not subscribe to it, request in your message that replies be sent
       directly to you, with a copy to the forum. (Conversely, if you are
       answering a question in the Pine Discussion Forum, be sure to
       include the inquirer's email address in your reply, since s/he may
       not be a subscriber and will otherwise not see your answer).
       
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  Why does command X not work?
  
   Some of the Pine commands you may read or hear about have to be
   explicitly enabled in the SETUP CONFIGURATION menu, which is accessed
   from Pine's MAIN MENU, to be functional. For example, to be able to
   use the "Bounce" command, the following feature has to be checked:
     [X]  enable-bounce-cmd

   and to be able to use the "Select"/"Apply" operations, you must first
   check:
     [X]  enable-aggregate-command-set

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  How can I filter messages into different incoming folders?
  
   Pine does not perform delivery filtering; that is the function of
   other programs, such as (on Unix hosts) "procmail" or "mailagent." For
   details on selection and configuration of such programs, see the
   Filtering Mail FAQ (by Nancy McGough) at one of the following
   locations:
   
   ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/mail/filtering-faq
   http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/mail/filtering-faq/
   faq.html
   ftp://ftp.halcyon.com/pub/ii/internet/filtering_mail_faq.txt
   
   Once you have successfully set up your delivery filtering, you will
   have new mail arriving in several different folders, in addition to
   your INBOX. You can then access these folders just like any other mail
   folder. You can also define a collection of incoming message folders
   in Pine, through which you can then TAB to read new messages. For more
   information, see Pine's internal help on the enable-incoming-folders
   feature in Pine's SETUP CONFIGURATION menu.
   
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  How do I define my own headers like Reply-To and Organization?
  
   From Pine's MAIN MENU, choose Setup, then Config. Move down to the
   customized-hdrs option and read the context-sensitive help screen.
   
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  How do I control what is displayed in the FOLDER INDEX screen?
  
   The display of fields in the FOLDER INDEX screen can be customized.
   For example, you can choose to have both the From and the To field (by
   default, the FOLDER INDEX will list the From address unless it is you,
   then it will list the To address) of each message shown; to suppress
   the message number display in each line; or to have the Subject field
   take up 60% of the line width. From Pine's MAIN MENU, choose Setup,
   then Config. Then go to the index-format option and read the
   context-sensitive help screen.
   
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  How can I have a signature automatically appended to my mail messages?
  
   From Pine's MAIN MENU, choose Setup, then Signature. The text you
   enter in the SIGNATURE EDITOR (new in Pine 3.92) will be appended to
   all messages you compose.
   
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  How do I send a message to multiple recipients without showing all their
  names?
  
   In Pine's message composer, with the cursor in the message headers
   area, press Ctrl-R ("rich headers"). Then read the context-sensitive
   help screens for the Bcc: and Lcc: fields.
   
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  How can someone without Pine decipher an attachment to a message I send?
  
   Pine uses the MIME Internet standard for attaching files to email
   messages. Any MIME-capable mailer should be able to "understand"
   Pine's attachments. If the recipient of your message with attachment
   does not have MIME-capable email software, they should be able to save
   the attachment to a file and then decode that. One freely-available
   program which can decipher a MIME attachment is munpack from Carnegie
   Mellon. It is available at:
   ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack
   
   Another one is UUDeview, available at:
   http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/~fp/uudeview/
   
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  Can Pine be used with a POP server?
  
   As of version 3.96, PC-Pine cannot be used with a POP (Post Office
   Protocol) server. PC-Pine 4.00 will be able to access a POP server,
   but not in offline mode; that is, the computer running PC-Pine has to
   remain network-connected while accessing the POP server. Pine for Unix
   can be configured to access the message INBOX on a POP3 server using
   the folder definition syntax

        {pop3server/pop3}INBOX

   where pop3server is the hostname of the POP3 server. However, this
   method accesses the POP server in quasi-online mode, not in offline
   mode, which POP was designed for. Accessing the inbox on a POP3 server
   with Pine does not preserve changes to message flags (New, Answered,
   Deleted, etc.) between sessions.
   
   As an alternative, a program such as fetchmail (which supercedes
   popclient) can be used to download email from a POP server to a local
   Unix account, where it can then be accessed with Pine. fetchmail can
   be obtained from:
   http://locke.ccil.org:80/~esr/esr-freeware.html#fetchmail
   
   Note: support for the offline mode of email access (using either POP
   or IMAP) is planned for a future release of Pine and PC-Pine. For a
   more detailed comparison of the POP and IMAP protocols, see Message
   Access Paradigms and Protocols at the URL:
   http://www.imap.org/imap.vs.pop.html
   
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   End of Pine Frequently Asked Questions - more questions & answers
   about Pine can be found at the URL:
   http://www.washington.edu/pine/QandA/
   or
   ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/docs/QandA.txt
   
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13 August 1997

