"Secrets of Pine 3.9" ===================== ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- --> Pine 3.91 released on 94.10.11 (fixes some significant bugs in 3.90) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION Thank you for trying Pine 3.9! This version offers many new features, and even some new bugs, so please let us know about any problems you encounter via the "Report Bug" command (B on the Main Menu). Some of the information in this document is included in Pine's online help text, but we hope the additional detail in certain areas will be useful to you. Also, a few items that are not new in 3.9 are mentioned, since they have not been well-documented in the past. CONTENTS o Overview of what's new in Pine 3.9 o How to use aggregate operations o How to use Pine for reading and posting Internet news o How to use "incoming message" folders o Did you know that... o Errata OVERVIEW OF WHAT'S NEW IN PINE 3.9 Here are some highlights of what's new: o Several long-promised commands are now available: -"B Bounce" to remail a misdirected msg to the correct recipient -"* Flag" to set or re-set message status, e.g. New or Important -"| Pipe" to send the contents of a msg to a Unix command o Aggregate message operations: "; Select" to select a set of messages "Z Zoom" to zoom the FOLDER INDEX to show only selected messages "A Apply" to apply a command (e.g. Save) to all selected msgs o Builtin configuration screen (Setup/Config on the MAIN MENU). o News posting. o News subscription/unsubscription. o Multiple address books. o Postpone multiple messages. o Customizable headers for Composer. o Improved MIME attachment support via "Mailcap" configuration file. o Improved support for multiple incoming message folders. o Improved TakeAddress capabilities. o Feature to invoke an alternate editor implicitly. o Features may be specified on the command line. o Feature to turn off implicit marking of a message as deleted when Saved. o Feature to use current-working-directory for Export, ^R, etc. o Control file to specify which options are user-configurable. o A Beta version of PC-Pine for Windows/Winsock is now available. Note that many of these features must be explicitly enabled, either by you or your system manager, and some may be administratively disabled at your site due to security or support considerations. If any of them don't seem to work for you, please check with your local support staff before reporting a bug. HOW TO USE AGGREGATE OPERATIONS Aggregate operations are a new (optional) feature in Pine 3.9. They give you the ability to select all of the messages in the current folder that match some specified criteria, and then to apply any of Pine's ten message operations (i.e. Save, Export, Print, Forward, Reply, TakeAddr, Pipe, Flag, Delete, Undelete) to the entire set of selected messages. The following commands constitute the "aggregate command set": "; Select" to select a set of messages "Z Zoom" to change the Index to show only selected messages "A Apply" to apply a command (e.g. Save) to all selected msgs As is the case with most new Pine features, aggregate operations are not enabled by default so that the basic "out of the box" Pine configuration may remain as simple as possible. To use this particular capability, set the "enable-aggregate-command-set" feature via the MAIN MENU Setup command (after Setup, choose Config). Message selection can be based on message numbers (as shown in the Folder Index), dates, status (e.g. New, Answered), or any part of the message text (headers or body). Selected messages are denoted by an "X" in the first column of their FOLDER INDEX entry, unless the "show-selected-in-boldface" feature has been chosen via the Setup/Config screen. Multiple selections are possible. In this case, Select will prompt you to either Broaden or Narrow the selection, and then ask for the match criteria to do that. In addition, when aggregate operations are enabled, the WhereIs command in the FOLDER INDEX screen will have a new "^X Select Matches" sub-command. When you enter a match string at the WhereIs prompt and press ^X instead of RETURN, every message in the folder whose Index listing includes the match string will be selected. HOW TO USE PINE FOR READING AND POSTING INTERNET NEWS Previous versions of Pine were capable of reading Internet newsgroups (Usenet), but the ability to post messages to these newsgroups, or subscribe to them, is new in Pine 3.9. It is possible that your system manager has configured Pine so that everyone on the system automatically has access to news. You can check this by looking for a news folder collection at the end of your FOLDER LIST screen. If it's not there, you will need to tell Pine the name of your local news server. Here are the steps for using this facility: 1. Choose the "Setup" command from the MAIN MENU. 2. Select "Config". 3. Use the down-arrow-key to select the option "nntp-server". 4. Press "A" to Add a value to this option. Type in the name of the news server for your site, then press RETURN. You will need to get this information from your local support staff. A typical news server name would be: "news.nowhere.edu". 5. Return to the MAIN MENU by pressing "E". 6. Press "Q" to quit Pine; then restart Pine. This is necessary to have the above configuration change take effect. 7. After restarting Pine, choose the FOLDER LIST screen by pressing "L". 8. Select "News-collection" (you can press SPACE to move to the news- collection, which will be the last item in the FOLDER LIST screen.) 9. Press RETURN if you see: [ Select Here to See Expanded List ]. If you have used a different newsreader previously, you probably already have a news subscription file with your favorite news groups listed. If not, you need to add some... 10. Press "A" to Add more news groups to your news subscription file. If you know the name of the group you wish to subscribe to, enter it at the prompt and press RETURN; otherwise, press the "To All Grps" key. Select the desired group and press RETURN. Repeat to add more groups. 11. Once you have newsgroups displayed in the FOLDER LIST, you may select them just like mail folders. One difference between news and (personal) mail folders: while you can mark News messages Deleted, just like with mail, you may not actually eXpunge them from the newsgroup folder. Instead, you may "eXclude" them from view, using the "X" command. In order to remain compatible with other news readers, Pine uses the same ".newsrc" news subscription file. However, this file can record very little message state information. The "Deleted" flag is the only message status flag that is preserved between sessions. When you reply to a news message, Pine will ask if you want to post the reply to the listed Newsgroups. When the current folder is a newsgroup and you enter the Composer, Pine will ask if you want to post to the current newsgroup. Even if you say "no", you may manually enter a newsgroup name, after exposing that header in the Composer by pressing Control-R. (There is also an optional feature to suppress this prompt if you'd like Pine to assume that you want to Post whenever invoking the composer while reading a newsgroup folder.) Here are some additional hints about using Pine for newsreading... o In most cases, the only thing you will need to do to enable news reading/posting is to set the "nntp-server" variable, as described above. For some configurations, such as reading news from the same machine Pine is running on, you will also need to set the "news-collections" variable. Use the context-sensitive help in the Setup/Config screen to see an example of this case. o You may specify a list of hosts for the nntp-server variable. In the absence of an explicit news-collection setting, the first nntp-server listed will be used for reading news. Any other hosts listed will be used for posting messages if the first host is unavailable. o PC-Pine users, take note! PC-Pine will normally look for your news configuration file (NEWSRC) first in your PC home directory (typically C:\NEWSRC) and if it doesn't find it there will look in the same directory where your PINERC file is. You may set the "newsrc-path" variable (PC-Pine only) to specify a different path if you prefer.