Making effective use of Pine - III ==================================

In the last issue, we learnt how to use our address books to best effect. There's much more that you can do with your address book. You should experiment with the different menu options available in the address book screen. Use Ctrl+G for help on any screen. Even the help screen.

Just for safety, you'd probably want to back up your address book before you fool around with options. I don't think you'd mess anything up, but even so, your address book is stored as two files in your home directory, aptly named .addressbook and .addressbook.lu, the latter being an index of your address book.

Today, we'll look at the different configuration options, and set some of them to make the most out of pine. You'll have to get to the configuration screen for this. I think you know how.

The first thing I generally do, is set the default-fcc to a blank value. I do this because I don't like to save sent mail. This is really a personal decision, so I'll let you make it. You could change the value if you want. Alternately, you could set a different sent-mail folder for each person that you send mail to. We saw this in the address book.

We next go down to Composer Preferences. It makes sense to turn on search and replace. This is disabled by default, because it would only confuse novice users. This option changes the behaviour of the Ctrl+W key in compose mode from search, to search and replace. You should probab try a search and replace right now, just to see how it works. I'm not going to tell you.

The next option I enable is sigdashes. Sigdashes are a special character sequence used to separate the mail from its signature. The sequence is "\n-- \n" without the quotes. For those of you who aren't programmers, this means the enter key, followed by two dashes, followed by a space, followed by the enter key again. I guess the big question on everybody's mind right now is, "Why do we need a fixed sequence for something as insignificant as this? Why can't everyone just decide how to do it on their own?". Valid questions, and here's the valid answer. Standards are good. By using a standard separator, mail clients can easily separate the body from the signature without the user's intervention.

With sigdashes enabled, if you include the original message in your replies, pine will automatically strip everything from the sigdashes onwards. The advantage of this, is that your mail doesn't get cluttered with everyone else's signatures. The disadvantage, which should be obvious now is, what if one really wants to include the other person's signature? I think that is easily accomplished through copy-paste.

The second thing that sigdashes does, is automatically include the sigdashes before your signature in all outgoing mail. This of course happens only if you have a signature.

The next option I enable is quell-dead-letter-on-cancel. If you've ever cancelled a mail, you'll notice that it saves the cancelled mail as a file called dead-letter in your home directory. Often, this file is saved with permissions depending on your default umask (don't worry if you don't know what that means). If you have a non-restrictive umask, this could be saved with world readable permissions, which means anyone can read mail you've cancelled. Besides, it takes up disk space. Quelling it means that dead.letter won't be saved. The advantage is that you don't have to delete it everytime you quit pine.

Next, we come to Reply Preferences. The only option that you really want to enable is signature-at-bottom. All this does, is to put your signature right at the bottom of the mail, even if you include the original message in your reply. The option after that - strip-from-sigdashes-on-reply basically does the first part of enable-sigdashes without doing the second. This only applies if you didn't select enable-sigdashes.

In Sending Preferences, the only option I have is use-sender-not-x-sender. This makes your mail more standards compliant, but has little effect on anything else. You'll notice its positive effects only in rare cases, but I recommend turning it on anyway.

The next block is where pine really shines above all other mail user agents. Folder preferences along with a few features give you amazing power to categorise your mails.

The first two options go hand in hand. Combined-folder-display affects how folders show up in the folder list screen. By default, only collections are shown (eg: incoming folders, mail folders, newsgroups). Selecting one of these collections will show you all folders in that collection. If this is what you do everytime, you may want to enable it by default. The previous option, combined-subdirectory-display affects how subdirectories in folders are displayed. By default, they show up in a separate screen. Enabling this feature will allow them to show up in the same screen as all your other folders.

The only problem you'll face with these options is that if your folder list exceeds one screenful, pine will take a few seconds to format the scrolling display. That's not too much of an issue for most people.

We will also enable expanded-view-of-folders here. By default, pine will only expand one collection at a time. To have all your collections expanded, select this option. It allows you to see all your folders at a single glance. Finally, to avoid unnecessary clutter, we'll enable quell-empty-directories. This causes empty directorie to be hidden from the folder list. It doesn't delete the directory, but merely hides it from view.

The last option I enable here is enable-incoming-folders. This is sort of an advanced option, and I'll deal with it later when we do incoming folders.

We probably won't need to change address book settings, except maybe setting an expanded-view-of-distribution-lists. This will show us all addresses under the distribution list instead of just the name. The problem here is that it may take ages to actually scroll through your entire address book.

In Message Index Preferences, I only have delete-skips-deleted enabled. This saves me the time of moving past deleted messages in the index, by jumping over a whole group of deleted messages at a time. When you try it, you'll know what I mean.

In viewer preferences, I have almost all options enabled. Attachments, urls, web-hostnames and addresses. The first allows one to click (or press enter) on an attachment, and have that attachment shown in its default viewer. The second does that with urls (even in plain text email), and the third with web hostnames. Pine figures that anything starting with "www." is a web hostname, so you could get false hits with this. Addresses is for email addresses, or more correctly, anything with an @ in it. Selecting this item will send mail to the specified address.

Pine by default doesn't handle anything other than email (and news), but it lets you specify any kind of viewer that you may want for each mime type. We'll see how to do this later.

I would normally have enabled prefer-plain-text, but due to the proliferation of html mail these days, I chose not to.

Most of the remaining commands in pine are advanced, so we'll handle them in a later section. For now, experiment with everything we've done today. Try enabling and disabling different features to see how it makes a difference. Read help on each of the features that you've changed.