[ale] pine

[Glenn Stone]

On 1 Sep 1999, Reverend wrote:

> 
> There is an internal mail message that is left in your var/spool/mail.  If
> you run elm or mutt, i belive, it will pull up the message and you can
> remove it.  It says something like "internal mail system file, do not
> delete" or something like that.  I always save it to a folder and leave
> it.

True.  This is the way Pine saves internal state information across
invocations.  You can turn on the feature quell-folder-internal-msg
(by either running Configure-Setup from pine's main menu or by (if 
you dare) editing .pinerc), then use elm to delete the old message, 
if you want to lose the thing permanently.  What do you lose by doing
this?  "Answered" flags.  <yawn>  

While you're at it, make sure you're at Pine 4.something; there's a whole
lotta bugs in Pine 3 that got fixed; stock Red Hat 5.2 folks are still at
Pine 3.96 and therefore vulnerable.  Source available at 
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine, latest is Pine 4.10, which also includes
a new version of Pico and Imapd (one with none of those annoying security
bugs in it).  (RH/Mandrake 6 folks should be ok at Pine 4.04 and 4.05
respectively, dunno about Debian or SuSE.)  

Somebody really should come out with a doodad with the vi-like qualities of
elm (hjkl do logical things always, ditto return and spacebar) and the
interface capabilities of pine (imap, multiple mailboxen), mebbe call it oak
or or cedar or something totally nonsensical like YAM (Yet Another MUA)....

but I'm too busy stuck in device driver hell to do it right now. :(

-- Glenn