OT: How to download a whole mailbox using Pine?

man fetchmail

Hmm ... unix at the other end, and unix at your end (based on the headers. No ftp access but do you have a shell account there -- if so what about ssh? You could log onto the other system, tar it all up, and then use scp (the copy version of ssh) to copy it to your home system (assuming a static or known IP for the home system) -- or issue the scp from the home system if you can't do it the other way.

For that matter, you could even set up a local directory to receive everything, cd into that directory and try:

( ssh your-username@ISP-system ; tar -cf - . ) | tar -xvf -

assuming that ssh connection to the system is allowed,that should do it cleanly.

Of course -- that assumes that your mailbox on that system is in your home directory. If, instead, it is someplace like /var/spool/mail, you will need to just scp that file to your local system.

I would normally do "tar -xvpf -" on the local end, but I'm not sure that you want permissions and UIDs to be set as from the other end, since you probably have different usernames and UIDs on the two ends.

Good Luck, DoN.

[ ... ]

Aha! I didn't know that existed.

Note that on Solaris 10, it is part of the "Software Companion" CD/DVD, and not part of the main install DVD. (You can find it in:

/opt/sfw/bin/fetchmail

I suspect that this will be the solution for you.

Good Luck, DoN.

Fetchmail is like a screwdriver, it is useful for many things.

i

Thanks very much for the suggestions. Sorry I've taken a while to follow this up. I don't have FTP access to the other machine (I used to, and the current lack of FTP access is something I'm annoyed about), so I'll try "fetchmail".

Many thanks,

Chris

try it first with the keep setting to keep mail and not delete it.

i

That's a setting in "fetchmail"? Those "Do you want to delete last month's mail?" messages in Pine always used to annoy me.

Chris

Fetchmail reads fetchmailrc, you should see the manpages, it is a great program. It can download mail and keep it on the server. I use it daily (every minute from cron) at work.

mutt is also much better than pine IMO.

i

Thanks. I'll try it.

I tried "mutt" once, but didn't stick with it. Seem to remember that it was a bit of a pain to configure. I think it had a lot of bright colours to start with that I didn't like.

Best wishes,

Chris

On Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:07:54 -0600, with neither quill nor qualm, Ignoramus25819 quickly quoth:

You have a day job, other than surplus turnarounds and the algebra website?

--- Chaos, panic, and disorder--my work here is done.

yes

i

Those colors are totally under your control, including turning them all off. You apparently got a default .muttrc file with the colors turned on. Look for a section like this, and comment all the lines out (by putting a '#' at the beginning of each line.

====================================================================== # # Color definitions # # color [regexp] # color-list: white, black, green, magenta, blue, cyan, yellow, red, default, colorX color normal white blue color hdrdefault black yellow color header blue yellow "^From: ".* color header blue yellow "^Subject: ".* color header red yellow "^Received: from".* color header yellow red "^X-Originating-IP: ".* color header blue cyan "^X-Originating-Ip: ".* color index brightyellow blue .* color indicator black yellow color markers brightblue cyan color error red white color quoted yellow blue color search red blue color signature black yellow color tilde magenta blue color tree red green color attachment black red color body magenta blue "(ftp|http)://[^ ]+" # point out URLs color body white blue .* color bold green blue color message white blue ======================================================================

Or -- you could turn off the colors by setting the TERM variable to just plain xterm instead of xtermc or dtterm so it is not expecting to find color controls that work. :-)

Yes -- it takes a while to step through the rather massive .muttrc file to configure everything, but you can control pretty much

*everything*. The trick is knowing which ones really matter to you. Most you can leave at the defaults.

Enjoy, DoN.

I have colors turned off myself.

i

Just for future reference, I had the following suggestion and it worked perfectly:

Many thanks for the help!

Best wishes,

Chris