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Using pine as an IMAP client to access your
@stanford.edu
email account
Last revision August 15, 2007
As described in news items,
email service will end on pangea by November 1, 2007, and
email forwarding will end on June 30, 2008.
If you have been using the
pine email program
on pangea to read and manage your mail, you can switch your
email to your
@stanford.edu
account and continue to use
pine
from one of the
ITS UNIX systems.
But you must follow the instructions in this note first to
properly configure
pine
for your SUNet account on the ITS Unix systems.
Why you need to fix
pine
on the ITS Unix systems.
In the default configuration, if you run
pine
on one of the ITS Unix systems, it can only see the
INBOX
of your
@stanford.edu
email account (not any
IMAP
saved email folders);
and every time it runs, it moves all new email from that
INBOX
to your home directory in the
AFS file space.
There are three problems with this approach for people used to
pine
on pangea, where it operates like an IMAP client:
-
Once your new email messages are moved by
pine
from your
INBOX
to your AFS file space, you can no longer see them with
webmail
or a Windows or Macintosh email program such as
Eudora,
Outlook,
Mac OS Mail,
or
Thunderbird.
Those programs look only on the email server disks for your email;
they cannot access your AFS space.
-
Similarly, any folders of saved email created by
webmail
or an IMAP client are stored on the email server disks and cannot
be seen by
pine.
For example, if you use the convenient
email transfer tool
to move your saved
pine
mail folders from pangea to your
@stanford.edu
account, they become IMAP folders and are not visible to
pine
on the ITS Unix systems in the default mode.
-
Available disk space for storing email in AFS space is much less
than on the email servers. You are limited to 200 Megabytes total
in your AFS space, which you may also be using to store files for
access from computers around campus. Each person is allowed
500 Megabytes on the email servers to store email, leaving your
AFS space available for other uses.
Clearly, it would be better if
pine
running on the ITS Unix servers would leave your email on the email
servers. This can be accomplished by re-configuring it to run as a
true IMAP client. That is equivalent to the way we run it on pangea.
Then you can alternate between
pine,
webmail,
and
Windows or Macintosh IMAP clients to read and manage the email on your
@stanford.edu
email account.
This will also allow you to alternate with a Windows or Macintosh POP client
if you are only using
pine
to check new messages in your
INBOX.
How to fix
pine
on the ITS Unix systems.
Follow these instructions
exactly
to properly configure
pine
to access your
@stanford.edu
email account as an IMAP client.
If you have just transferred your saved email from pangea to your
@stanford.edu
account using the
email transfer tool,
don't try to run
pine
on the ITS Unix systems
until you have finished these steps
to avoid ending up with some of your
email in AFS space and some on the email servers.
If you have used
pine
on the ITS Unix systems in the past under the default configuration
and already have some saved email folders in AFS space, don't worry,
the configuration program will recognize that and make sure that
your AFS email folders and the ones on the email servers (for example,
the ones transferred from pangea) are both accessible to
pine.
-
Instead of logging into a terminal or command-line session on pangea with an
ssh client,
open a connection to
elaine.stanford.edu
and
login with your SUNet ID name and password.
You will be randomly connected to one of 38 identical "elaine" systems
(elaine1, elaine2, ..., elaine38).
-
Once you are logged in and you get the
elaineNN:~>
prompt),
type in the following command exactly as shown (you can cut and paste
it) and press the RETURN key to run it:
/afs/ir.stanford.edu/users/f/a/farrell/public/pineimap
-
This
pineimap
program will take a few seconds to modify the configuration settings for
your command shell and for your use of the
pine
program.
It may create or modify any of these files in your AFS home directory:
.login,
.cshrc,
.tcshrc,
.bashrc,
.profile,
and
.pinerc.
Do not delete any of these files!
In case of problems,
pineimap
does create a backup unmodified copy of any file that it modifies
(using a
.old
suffix).
-
When the
pineimap
program finishes, don't try to run
pine
just yet!
You have to logout and then login again in order to get the new,
correct configuration settings.
Always login to
elaine.stanford.edu
when running
pine
as an IMAP client to access your
@stanford.edu
email account. It does not work correctly in this configuration on the other
ITS Unix systems.
Differences between pangea
pine
and the ITS UNIX systems
pine.
pine
as an IMAP client on the ITS Unix systems behaves differently than
pine
on pangea in these minor ways:
-
Printing
pine
on pangea uses the
Y
key to print a message to the default Unix printer you have
established for your pangea account.
On the ITS Unix systems,
pine
uses the
%
key to invoke printing. It prompts whether you want to
print the current message or an index of messages.
It then offers to print to "attached to ansi" (the
default) but also allows you to enter a "custom" Unix command
instead.
"Attached to ansi" means the default printer queue that you have
setup on your own workstation (Windows or Macintosh).
Just pressing the RETURN key to use "attached to ansi" lets
pine
on the ITS systems route the print job through your workstation.
For most people, this is actually more convenient than the way
pine
prints on pangea.
-
Folder collections
On pangea,
pine
always ran in an IMAP-compatible mode, and it would show you only a
single "folder collection" called
Local folders in mail/.
On the ITS Unix systems, once you have configured
pine
to run as an IMAP client, the equivalent "folder collection"
(including saved email transferred from pangea) is called
Folders on sunetidname.pobox.stanford.edu
in INBOX,
where
sunetidname
is your SUNet ID account name.
If you already had some saved email folders from
pine
in AFS space, it will also show you another folder collection named
Local folders in yourhomedir/Mail/,
where
yourhomedir
is the path to your home directory in AFS space.
Use the
L
key to switch between these two possible folder collections in
pine
on the ITS Unix systems.
Then you can see the list of folders in each collection and select one. The
G
key also works the same as it did on pangea to go directly to a folder
by name. It will let you toggle between the current folder collection
and the alternate one using the
CONTROL-P
and
CONTROL-N
keys.
Like everything in
pine,
use the
CONTROL-G
key to get onscreen help for these operations.
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