Topic: Pine

[Richard Emerson]

Hi , one other quick question, has anyone got a quick fix for pine? ie as a user (after changing shell in the password file) upon 1st time use of pine it gives error about mail boxes, unable to create, I seen some info about pine and qmail config, have not had time to read it yet.

[Joseph Morrison]

Hello Richard,

By default, each user's home directory (as defined in the /etc/passwd file) is not writeable. This is a safety precaution to prevent users from accidentally deleting or renaming their Maildir and "home" subdirectories, which are required for the e-smith software to work properly. (The "home" subdirectory is for user files, and is writeable.)

Pine is probably trying to create mailboxes in the home directories, so you'll need to make them writeable using the command:

chmod u+w /home/e-smith/files/users/*

You'll have to redo this each time you add a new user, unless you customize the e-smith action definitions.

There is some information about how to customize this sort of thing on http://www.e-smith.org, and we also offer developer support contracts for those who want to be able to count on help from us while making modifications.

> I seen some info about pine and qmail config,
> have not had time to read it yet.

This information is probably not helpful in this particular case. Pine should be configured to retrieve email via POP3, and should not try to directly interface with qmail in any way.

Hope this helps. Best regards,
- Joe

[Charlie Brady]

Richard Emerson wrote:

> Hi , one other quick question, has anyone got a quick fix for
> pine? ie as a user (after changing shell in the password file)
> upon 1st time use of pine it gives error about mail boxes,
> unable to create, I seen some info about pine and qmail
> config, have not had time to read it yet.

Joe has already posted some information about the basic cause
of this apparent problem.

Pine will try to create a .pinerc file, possibly some pine-debug* files, and a directory in which to place mail folders. All of those files and directories could be created
when a user is added, without the home directory being made permanently writable.

It's one of the things I might get around to doing myself. There'll be something on the web site if I do, or it will be included in a future release of the e-smith server.

Have a look at /etc/pine.conf and /etc/pine.conf.fixed. There
might be some values there that you can tweak to improve the
default behaviour of pine.