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In our setup we have a number of users who alternately use pine as well as some pop client for their email. Since upgrading our RH 6.2 pine package to 4.30-1.62, these users are experiencing problems. It appears that when you first run the new pine version for the frist time that it moves your mail spool file into $HOME/mbox (as pine will do if mbox already exists). Of course, when people try to later pop their mail off the server, they can't see their recent messages. BUT, if you manually merge the mbox back into the spool file, and then remove the mbox file, pine seems to forget that there was ever an mbox. Is there some system-wide solution I can implement rather than manually merging and deleting every time a user has this problem? More importantly, is there a way to keep pine from doing this?
There's no perfect solution, you'll have to decide which sickness you want to have. The symptom that you are describing means that the C-Client library, a tool used to compile Pine, was compiled enabling the "mbox" file. If you are reading mail from the spool (not from a server) you can stop Pine from moving mail between the spool and the "mbox" file by adding "mbox" to the line "disable-these-drivers" in your personal ".pinerc" file. If you want to do this system-wide you would have to add this value in the file /usr/local/lib/pine.conf. After you add this value to either one of those two files, Pine will only read mail from the spool. If you decide to do that, then users who do have a "mbox" file will complain that they lost their mail, since Pine won't see it again. You'll end up fixing their accounts too. If your users have their INBOX in a server, and read mail through an IMAP connection, there's nothing you can do. Adding the above mentioned line to either the system-wide pinerc or to your personal pinerc won't do any good. It will be completely ignored, because the responsible of moving these messages between the INBOX and "mbox" is not Pine, it is the server, and there's no way at this time to tell the server to stop moving messages on a per user basis. In another words, there's no much you can do at this time. This is not a bug, since the intended behavior is that "mbox is an INBOX access method", which is perfectly accomplished as you can see. The real problem is that there is no perfect solution available today.
I have looked into this problem a fair bit, and discussed it with Ed as well. He has some interesting ideas that may or may not fix the problem for you. After looking deeper into the issue however, it seems aparent to me that a fix would involve some IMHO major changes to PINE and/or IMAP sources, which would in effect be a fork of the pine source code, which _I_ would have to maintain. If PINE were GPL, or GPL compatible, then it could be considered, however I have no intent on making Red Hat Linux's pine incompatible with all other existing PINE implementations. This problem is not specific to Red Hat Linux, and since the code is not completely "open", it is out of our control. I recommend taking this up with the PINE development team, perhaps encouraging them to relicense their code as GPL so that it is more flexible. Good luck, and let me know how you fare with the pine folk. Take care.