A help seeker today told me that her mailbox had been compressed and she
didn't seem to get it.  I told her how to gunzip the file and read it with
pine.  Have a lot of people been confused by having their mail moved out
of the mail spool?  Do we need to compose a better message of explanation
to people who have to have their mail taken out of the spool? 

15 responses total.

I wouldn't be surprised. The casual user just wants to get (and maybe read?)
mail, and doesn't concern themselves about spools or filespace, etc. They
would also not know anything about compression. We are moving into the
era of "user friendly interfaces", where general ignorance is endemic.

what's in the text of the current letter?

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I told the person yesterday that uncompress was only for .Z files, and
she'd need to use gunzip.  I think the next thing that confused her is
that I told her to !gunzip right now (while in write) and it worked
silently and she didn't realize it had done anything.  I also told her
that she should go into pine first and tell pine to look at mailbox
../delete_me 

I wonder if it would be worth adding to the message a suggestion to 
 zcat delete_me; rm delete_me
or whatever to download and remove the file.

And there should be a way to make pine behave like mail - move the mail
from the spool after you've read it.  I think that would help a lot.

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Easy to fix.  

uncompress -v delete_me

v for verbose.

Maybe we could provide an easier-to-use shell script which
runs "uncompress -v delete_me"?  Maybe even dumps the user
into the mail handler of their choice with the "-f delete_me"
option set?

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Are you sure there aren't a lot of pine users who don't know that they're
supposed to delete old messages?

It would help if pine had monthly folders for old mail, like it does for
sent mail, and offers to delete each old folder when the new one is
created. 

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Re #12: I changed my default to save sent mail. However I don't see an
option in .pinerc to move mail from the spool to a folder (as "incoming
mail") at the end of each month. If it were automatic, the spool would
be much relieved.

Re 12 re 10:  Yes, I know that.  I meant that some pine users read new
mail and leave it (and all old mail) in the spool directory because it
doesn't work like the "mail" program and move mail you've seen to a file
like ~/mbox.  You have to explicitly delete or save each message.

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