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A role gives you the ability to change your identity, signature or set headers in a e-mail. You may think that there's nothing special about this, since one can always change the headers and signatures in every message just by editing them. But let's say that whenever you post to a newsgroup you always want the same signature, which is different from the one you use to send messages to your boss, and you would like therefore this set automatically. That's what roles are for.
People usually say that they "set a role" when they start composing a message, meaning that they choose an "identity". So for example, if you are the president of your company, you can have messages whose signature will be different when you write a business e-mail than when you write a message to a family member or friend, and all of this done automatically by Pine.
The only thing you must not forget is that once a role is set, you can't change it. You must restart the composition of your message again, and choose the right role (or no role). Unfortunately because of the way that Pine is designed, there's nothing that can be done to remedy this situation. The good news is that there are ways to configure Pine so that you will always be able to configure which role to use.
Every Role has two parts, the conditions and the action part. The conditions are several configuration options which you must set in order for the role to be activated (e.g. The message that you are replying to is from a specific mailing list). A role is used if all conditions for its usage are satisfied (with exceptions to be discussed later). When you set up a role you must indicate an action. For example an action may be "set the signature file to be a specific file, which is different from my main signature file and set the from line to look in a very specific way". As you will see the fact that an action is set does not mean that the action will be executed, there are few configuration options that relate to roles, which override the actions you may choose in each role.
Every time you start to compose a message (by either replying to a message, starting a fresh one or forwarding a message), Pine goes through your list of roles, and tests each one, if it finds a match (that is to say, if it tests all the conditions and all of them are satisfied), it will check to see if it must use it, or it must ask you if you want to use it or you do not want to use it at all. Here's what happens next:
To get to the Roles setup screen you must press M S R R, you have essentially two options; you can either press ?, and read help on how to set up roles or press A to add a role. Remember to give a good nickname to each role that you create so that you can go back to them afterwards if changes are necessary in the future.
The part that needs to be set up in the headers, status and folder section is setup in the same way than you do it for filters, and the explanation can be found here. Just change the word filter by role where appropriate.
One of the main uses of a role is to be able to set a custom From field. In this way you get the From field set automatically. Simply add the value to the variable Set From. Something like
Set From = Peter Flinstones <peter@bedrock.com>works well.
| Tip: Every time that you add a role and change the From field in this way, add the address (in the above example peter@bedrock.com) to the alt-addresses configuration option. This option can be found in the setup menu: From the main screen press S C to find it. |
This is a tricky part, because the Fcc field can be set in several different parts in your configurations (e.g. you can set a Fcc for a friend in your addressbook, and also a global Fcc: in your .pinerc file). The obvious question is which setting has priority. The rule here is this: "if you set a value in the role, that value will be used, regardless of any other configuration options"
Notice that the default text for this option in the role configuration screen is misleading. In fact, when you first start to configure a role, you will see the following text:
Set Fcc = <No Value Set: using "value from fcc-name-rule">.
This text implies that if you do not set this value, then your default "sent-mail" folder will be used. This is not quite true, the complete truth is that this value is used only if the Fcc: folder is not set in the addressbook for the specific recipient of the message (in which case it would use that value for the Fcc:) or if the recipient is not in your addressbook.
If you set this configuration option to be <Empty Value> (which is obtained by deleting the value "No Value Set" of this variable), it means that no copies of any messages sent using this role will be kept. Remember that <Empty Value> is a value for the Fcc, which implies that it overrides any other configuration for Fcc you may have somewhere else.
Read all the information concerning a signature, including their use in roles, in the signature section.
A template is a file that contains text that will be inserted into the message that you are composing when using a specific role. Notice that this text is put at the beginning of the message. In some sense you can think of it as a signature file, but it also has several differences that are worthwhile mentioning here.
It is similar to a signature file in the sense that is can contain tokens, that are expanded, in the same way that you can include tokens in a signature file. When replying you could use this file to generate a reply-leadin-string, the problem with this method of doing things is that you will have two reply-leadin-strings generated by Pine every time you reply to a message, so you will have to delete one when starting a message.
The Template File could also include a text that you will always want included in your messages. A fancy way to use this could be to make Pine include automatically the sentence "Dear _FROM_", where _FROM_ is expanded to the name of the person as appears in the From field. A still fancier way to do this that does not include any text if there's no personal name in the from field is to include the Template file to be
_ADDRESS_("_FROM_", "", "Dear _FROM_: ")
(the above says that if _ADDRESS_ is equal to "_FROM_", which only happens when there's no personal name in the From: field of the message, do not write anything, but if they are different, write "Dear _FROM_:").
A template file is different from a signature file, since two lines are prepended to the signature, instead a template file is not prepended with empty lines. You can also make the text in the template file a script, like for the signature, but no parameters are passed by Pine to the script.
In order to create a template file, you must put the cursor on the configuration option and press "F" (the obvious letter "E" means Exit). If you already have a template file that you want to use, you can use "A" to add its location, or "T" to find it. The obvious subcommand "^T" of the "A" command does not exist.
The location of the template file can be local or remote. The syntax for remote access is the same as for the inbox-path.
Since roles and filters are set in a similar way, people make the same mistakes that they would do for filtering, and they can be read here.
This is part of a bigger issue, which is the "C"ompose command.
Tradition (meaning that you started using Pine before version 4.10) indicates that for starting a new message you must press the "C" command. When you have set up roles, you have another choice: the "#" command. If you've never setup any roles, you will never know about them by starting a fresh message.
There are several possibilities, let's list them all and see how we can configure them:
Compose Use =
(*) Without confirmation
Compose Use =
(*) With confirmation
Compose Use =
(*) Never
Now you have two choices, either press "#" and select the role that
you want to use, or enable the following configuration option (in Pine4.30
or newer)
[ Composer Preferences ]
[X] alternate-compose-menu
and press "C", as you would normally do, but then press "R". This is a great
work around, if you always forget the "#" command.
You can set more headers, as many as you want. Again the same rules about priorities are valid, anything set here, overrides any value set in your customized-hdrs option or in your default-composer-headers configuration options.
The way to set them is fairly easy, all you need to do is add the name of the header, with its value, say something like:
Set Other Hdrs = X-My-Header: This is my header
Notice that this variable can contain a list of headers, there's an implication to that, which implies that you can not write a comma "," in the text of the header at all, so for example,
Set Other Hdrs = X-My-Location: Vancouver, Canada.
is not valid text. This is because the comma "," is used by Pine to separate entries in variables that are lists in the configuration file (your .pinerc file). Therefore the above text will look as if you entered two headers). You can get around this problem, however by entering the text that contains the commad between quotes, so
Set Other Hdrs = X-My-Location: "Vancouver, Canada"
would work. Notice that this work around does not work very well when you want to add a list of nicks from your address book, for example
Set Other Hdrs = To: "Peter, Wilma"
will not add the address of Peter Flintstone and Wilma, to the the To: field, it will instead add a text like
To: "Peter, Wilma"@your.domain.com
However, if you added directly
Set Other Hdrs = To: "peter@bedrock.com, wilma@bedrock.com"then Pine would add these addresses to the To: field, and fill out the personal names of these addresses, if they are found in your addressbook.
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