Pine and Evolution
 

Is there a way to make Pine and evolution play nice together? I use Evolution to check out pictures my friends send me (since it's a long time i don't see them) but i would like to switch to Pine, or maybe mutt, but clearly these email clients can't display pictures/attachments.
I fetch my mail from all the mail accounts with fetchmail, and store it into /var/mail/nskl , then evolution takes all the messages from /var/log/nskl and puts them into it's own ~/evolution directory. Pine on the other hand, from what i know, will also read /var/log/nskl and copy the mails from there to ~/mbox.
Is there a way to make evolution use the same mbox format, or any way to make both evolution and pine be able to read the same mail?
Thank you
-NSKL

pine is a good, happy and conformist UNIX mail program, and does NOT remove mail for a /var/spool mailbox (unless you use filters etc....) so your pine INBOX will always be in /var/spool/mail etc... Evolution though doesn't use this, same as KMail and other poncy apps (no idea why.... what could be the benefit in deliberatly ignoring standard practises????) i don't know if evilution's own format is actually mbox compatible or not but you could always try setting evil to use /var/blah if there's a setting for it.

however pine can view attachments via external programs. if i get an image in an email in pine i enter on it and ee or eog will pop up and show me the image, likewise galeon will open a new tab for a URL.... just a matter of setting the handlers, as i *think* pine still defaults to the xv viewer, which is ancient now, and pants....

Thats great news, i think i'll ditch evil then, for pine! However i need Pine to connect to my ISPs smtp server, and authenticate before it can send any e-mails. So far, im able to read e-mails fetched by fetchmail, but how do i get Pine to send them via smtp? I'm guessing this is not a Pine thing, Pine only hands the mail to the MTA, which is then responsible for contacting and authenticating with the smtp server, and then sending the message, But which MTA should i use? Any starting points?
I still didnt start reading up on this, since my first question was answered right away, so i might get a solution myself within next half an hour or so, but i'll still appreciate if someone mentions how they solved this problem, or correct me if i'm wrong.
Thanks
-NSKL

Re: Pine and Evolution
 

There is an environment variable called MAIL that you can set. By default, it points to the spool area on your system. By changing the value of this variable, you can point it to a different spool area or anywhere else you choose. Any Email clients that utilize this environment variable can then access mail from other locations, as long as they recognize the same mail folder format. In the case of Pine and Evolution, both recognize UNIX mail format.

well why not just set up your own smtp server? sendmail is *normally* actually set up completely fine by default for sending mail from localhost, all i ever needed to do was to force pine to set the FROM: header to my normal email address rahter than my standard username@hostname

Ok, that was what i was looking for. I spent the last hour reading Pine docs, and customizing Pine, while i should have really been reading about sendmail . Does sendmail needs to run as a service (at startup for example), and have a port assigned to it (So it shows on Nmap scans?). If so doesn't this open a nice security hole? I heard sendmail is full of security related bugs.
/me goes to read about sendmail now

Thanks for the help!
-NSKL

i'm not that aware of security flaws in sendmail, but it doesn't listen externally by default, so that's as secure as you would want it, as i assume you aren't running 24/7 as a server anyway, so couldn't use your machine as an external mail relay anyway. so you would need the port open, but you wouldn't actually be listening to it. obviously you could use postfix, qmail etc... instead.

Thats great! I'm officially converted from GUI e-mail clinets to Pine now. I configured sendmail to work with Pine, and fixed the "From:" filed by tweaking the "customised_hdrs" line in my .pinerc. Now i just need to figure out how to specify a image viewer and other minor things.
However i have one last question. I will be running Pine in a transparent terminal (Aterm). Do you know if i can enable colors, and still hace a transparent background? Now, when i enable colors, i get to specify a default background color (i chose black) but i'm wondering if there's a tweak to leave the background transparent and still use colors for everything else? It's more for my personal eye-candy mania than anything else, and i assume this will also reduce readability of messages, but i'm used to this using Vim this way, and yes, i just love transparent terms :D
Anyway, thank you for all your help, Acid!

-NSKL