mbox vs pine

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 07:18:24AM -0400, Duane Morin wrote:
> But now, when I use pine (which works), the first thing it tells me
> is "Moved x bytes of new mail from /var/spool/mail to mbox."
> 
> Whassupwitdat?  I don't think it's doing any harm, but lord knows I 
> do hate change. :)  If I just blow away mbox will it go back to 
> reading it right from /var/spool/mail?  (One of the reasons I prefer
> to keep it there is because I have a windows box that pulls mail in
> over POP and if I move it to mbox it will look like it's gone).

/var/spool/mail/$user is a spool mailbox; that is, new mail will arrive
there. mbox is just a mailbox in your home directory; it's where one
might store previously read mail.

If you want to keep the mail that was moved to mbox, and you are firmly
stuck on the single-mailbox paradigm, then move the mail back to
/v/s/m/$user. 

However, you might take this opportunity to discover the wonderful world
of modern mail user agents. Mutt, for example. Let me point out what I
have done for me:

mail comes in to my machine and is handled by qmail. Every address of
the form dsr-*@tao.merseine.nu is directed to dsr's mail handlers. Plain
dsr at tao mail is sent to SpamAssassin for checking, then is handed off to
a filtering program which sends each mailing list that I'm on to a
separate mail directory. It also handles killing off people I don't want
to hear from, by moving their messages into an "inspect later" group.

When I fire up Mutt, I see my main mail directory. Important messages
are available here. Every so often I sweep up everything more than n
months old and save it to an archive directory.

Any outgoing message I send is automatically copied to
~/Mail/archive/sent-YYYY-MM, a monthly archive.

Then I can look over my list of mail directories and see what has new
mail that I want to read right now. All the mail from, say,
discuss at blu.org is available in one spot. I have this maildir set to
automatically keep message threads together, so I can see both what's
new and what the context is.

All this is a bit of work to set up initially, but it can be done
incrementally, and you will receive many advantages at each step. Nor is
this the only way to do it; you can get the same advantages from
handling your mail in EMACS or Evolution, and from filtering your email
with procmail or Perl scripts or what have you.

-dsr-

-- 
Network engineer / pre-sales engineer available in the Boston area.
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr