pine does not deal correctly with multiple mboxes whose names differ only by case. For example, I have pine on this system configured as follows: inbox-path=Mail/Inbox folder-collections=Mail/[] default-fcc=Sent-mail (all mail delivery to ~/Mail using mboxes, main mbox is ~/Mail/Inbox, sent mail is copied to ~/Mail/Sent-mail) Most, but not all, mboxes in ~/Mail are displayed in the folder list (start pine, press L). The mbox ~/Mail/Inbox is displayed as INBOX (which is correct), while the mbox ~/Mail/inbox is not displayed at all (which is broken). This appears to be a special casing only for the case-insensitive string "inbox", since both ~/Mail/Sent-mail and ~/Mail/sent-mail do display.
Did you recompile PINE with mbox support?
Um, RH ships it compiled with mbox support.
Hmm, I wonder how that managed to slip through... damn. We disabled mbox support ages ago, and do not at all support it. I'll have to double check what happened that re-enabled it.
I'm confused. How would pine even be usable as anything other than an IMAP / POP client if it didn't support mboxes?
Perhaps there is a bit of confusion.. I am refering to mbox as the file ~/mbox which if it exists when PINE starts up, PINE will promptly copy the contents of /var/spool/mail/$USER to ~/mbox That is what we do not support, since it causes a lot of users a lot of problems, and creates a lot of support problems for us. If this is not related to your problem, then I've misunderstood. BTW, what version(s) of PINE do you see this problem in?
Ah, okay. I meant (and read your) "mbox" as meaning "standard mbox Unix mail spool file format" (versus things like Maildir or Maildir++ format mail files). I noticed this with pine-4.44, but it's probably broken in older releases too.
This is still true with the pine in the skipjack public beta (4.44-6)
The problem is not the format of the folder, the problem is that Pine won't let you create a folder containing the forbidden word "INBOX" (regardless of case). The string "INBOX" is a reserved word for the folder where you receive your mail, regardless of the real name (as a file) that that folder may have (e.g. /var/spool/mail/foo could be called INBOX), and you never see "foo" in your list of folders. As far as I understand this is not a bug in Pine, I would say, that Pine is not being helpful in clarifying this point though.
Thanks Ed, indeed I've looked at this too now and this is intentional operation of PINE. Thanks.