Setting up a Maildrop in Pine

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Introduction

A maildrop is an experimental feature introduced in Pine 4.55. You can think of a maildrop as a folder with special properties: when you open this folder, messages from another remote folder are moved into this folder.

The above means that when you set up maildrops, you must think of two folders. One is the folder from where you will be pulling messages and the other is the folder to where you will save the messages that you will be moving from the first folder. What makes this feature very powerful is that there is no requirement about the location of these two folders. It's possible to have a local maildrop to move messages to a remote folder, or viceversa, or even more, to move messages from one remote folder to another remote folder. The most typical use of a maildrop is to move messages from a remote server to a local folder.

After you have set up a maildrop, the folder from which you will be reading messages is the folder to which you used to move the messages. So if you set a maildrop to move messages from folder A to folder B, then you will be reading messages in folder B. You will never see folder A directly.

That a message is moved from folder A means that the message is copied to folder B and removed (expunged) from folder A.

One way to understand a maildrop is to think that a maildrop is a replacement for programs like fetchmail or leafnode, without the need to set up any external program to move your mail/news to a local folder.

Setting up a Maildrop

You can only set up a maildrop for your INBOX folder or any of your incoming folders. The explanation of how to add a maildrop to the incoming folders collection can be found by following this link

In order to make your INBOX folder to be a maildrop, you must define the inbox-path variable accordingly. The easiest way to do so is by pressing M S C and editing the value of the above said variable. Here I will describe a long step by step process. There is a way to add the definition in just one step, which is described later in this document.

Step 1 - Starting the Process

With the cursor on the inbox-path variable, press A. You will see a menu in the bottom of the screen, one of the options is ^W Use a Maildrop. Press ^W.
Step 2 - Defining the server from where messages will be pulled

The folder from where you are going to pull messages can be either local or remote. Here are your options:
1. If the folder you want to use is local, make sure that this field is empty and press RETURN.
2. If the folder that you want to use is remote, enter the definition of the server in the form name.server.com/user=yourid. If you need to access a POP3 server, add the string /pop3. If you need to connect to a news server add /nntp, and if the connection uses ssl, add /ssl too.
Step 3 - Defining the folder from where messages will be pulled

There are several options, here there are a few.
1. If you want to read mail that arrives to the server as defined in the previous step just press RETURN.
2. If you need to move messages from any other folder, give the path of the folder in that server.
3. If the folder is a newsgroup enter #news.name.newsgroup. For example, in order to create a maildrop for the newsgroup comp.mail.pine. enter #news.comp.mail.pine.
Step 4 - Defining the server to where messages will be pulled

This step is done in exactly the same form in which you do Step 2
Step 5 - Defining the folder to where messages will be pulled

This step is done in exactly the same form in which you do Step 3. However, exercise caution! You should not write INBOX as your default folder to save messages. If you do this, messages saved to a local folder will be moved to where Pine thinks your INBOX in that local machine is. This may have nasty effects, particularly if your INBOX is in a remote machine, so Pine will never see this e-mail, and you will think that you lost e-mail!

Also notice that in the case of local folders, Pine will create the folder if it does not exist.

Syntax for a Maildrop

If you think that the above instructions are long, you can abreviate them and can write them directly into the corresponding configuration variable. In order to define a maildrop, you must start the definition with the string #move, followed by the definition of the server from where messages will be moved and followed by the definition of the folder to where messages will be moved.

A typical example is the following

#move {some.server.com/pop3/user=myid}INBOX ~/.inc-fld/maildrop

this definition will move all mail from your INBOX in the pop3 server "some.server.com" to the file "maildrop" located in the subdirectory .inc-fld of your home directory. Observe that in the above definition there are three fields separated by spaces. However, an incoming folder may contain spaces, for example one could make a maildrop for a folder called Sent Items. In this case you must separate the fields above by something different than a space, for example one could use % as a separator, and so one could have the following valid definition for a maildrop

#move%{some.server.com/user=myid}/full/path/to/Sent Items%~/.inc-fld/maildrop

If you are thinking of editing your .pinerc file and adding a definition like this manually to the incoming-folders collection, enclose the whole definition between double quotes. For example something like

MyInbox "#move {some.server.com/pop3/user=myid}INBOX ~/.inc-fld/maildrop" will work.

Checking for New Mail

You can force checking for new mail in a maildrop folder in the same way that you check for new mail in your Inbox. You must either press CTRL-L or press the down arrow while the cursor is in the last message in the index.

Automatic checks are also done. The minimum interval that can be set is 60 seconds. There is a catch here which may be confusing. When your are in your INBOX, there is a mail-check-interval, which you may set to, say, 30 seconds. If your INBOX is a maildrop, the minimum time between checks will be 60 seconds, not 30. On the other hand if your mail-check-interval is 90 seconds, then your check will be done every 60 seconds.

You can change the default of 60 seconds between checks by changing the value of the variable maildrop-check-minimum in the configuration screen.

You can disable checking for new mail in a maildrop. This is desirable when your connection to the external server is slow, so it's expensive to check for new mail. If you want to disable check for new mail simply set maildrop-check-minimum = 0.

Adding a Remote Maildrop

Most of the time you are going to setup a maildrop to move messages from a remote server to a local folder. This is a nice way to set up Pine, but what would you do if you wanted to read this maildrop from another machine?.

Of course, there's nothing you can do if you do not have an IMAP server where that folder is located, but assume now that you do. In theory you can read the contents of the destination folder adding it as an incoming folder, but this has the problem that the folder is never updated with the new mail that may have arrived to the source folder of the maildrop.

In this case you must set this folder as a maildrop where the source folder is the same as before, but the destination folder is located in the IMAP server. How to do this has already been discussed.

There's one exception though. This is the case when the source folder for the maildrop is a newsgroup. This can not be set up as usual because the internal numbers of the messages in the server vary depending on the server, this means that you can not simply reuse your .newsrc file, and even if you could, there's no guarantee that the .newsrc files in both servers will agree all the time.

One way to avoid this problem is to use the .newsrc file located in the imap server where the folder is located, and in order to do this, you must set up the access to the news server as a proxy from the remote server that contains the destination folder of the maildrop.

Therefore the definition of the maildrop will look as follows:

Maildrop-Nick "#move {imap-proxy}{news.server/nntp}#news.group {remote-server}maildrop"

In this definition both imap-proxy and remote-server are the same server (use the same name!) the reason why they appear different in the above definition is because their purpose in this configuration is different. The first IMAP server serves the purpose of accessing the news server, the second IMAP server serves the purpose of saving the contents of the first folder into the second.

When to use a Maildrop for POP and NNTP?

Say you want to have an incoming folder for a pop server. Is it better to set it up as a maildrop or directly as an incoming folder?

The answer depends on some factors. Since a maildrop pulls messages from another folder, part of the answer will depend on the access to that mailbox. Do you want access from anywhere to the same information?

Remember that maildrops only exist in Pine, and only in recent versions, so if you are not going to use Pine from some other computer, or you are not going to use a recent version of Pine, you would be better off by not setting up a maildrop.

However, if you are always going to access your e-mail from the same place, Pine works better when you set up a maildrop. In fact, if not, pressing TAB will always open a POP3 or newsgroup, unless they are empty. This does not happen with maildrops. They are opened only if there are new messages.

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