# switch over to old mbox files?

## Target

I'm the only one using mail on my system and I've already got grep/awk/sed scripts I wrote a while back for mbox format, so... Does anyone know what to toggle in gentoo to switch the default for a system back over to mbox?

I'm using sendmail with procmail. Sendmail I know has no portage package but this system isn't security-critical, sendmail doesn't run as root here and I already have a set of sendmail configuration files tailored just the way I want them.

That said though, sendmail relies on procmail to actually deliver the mail... so it's procmail following a configuration directive or a system default that I haven't found yet and putting the mail in ~/.maildir

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## nick

take a look at the docs for procmail, they tell you how to deliver to all sorts of mailboxes

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## Target

Problem is, procmail doesn't actually have docs of its own beyond a couple of terse readme files in the tarball.

There are plenty of mini-faqs referenced at www.procmail.org and even a documentation project effort, but they just go over tons of regexp for writing spam-filtering recipes. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've been looking for over a day and can't find what I'm sure is an extremely simple needle in that haystack.

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## nick

http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs/#mailboxFormats

I think this should help, it seems basically that if you instruct procmail to deliver to a mailbox with a slash / at the end of the name it interprets it as a maildir, no slash and its the name of an mbox file

quite subtle and hard to suss unless u know the secret.

sorry i was on my way out when i posted ealier, toherwise i would have found it earlie

good luck

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## Target

I've tried that and thought I must be doing something wrong... Procmail just ignores my procmailrc and delivers in maildir format anyway.

I tracked it back to the actual source code. Portage alters procmail before compile to make it use maildirs. This is all well and good, but I think I would have appreciated a choice in the matter.

If you want something done right...  :Wink: 

A manual compile and install took care of it, though it's a shame... I'm straying more and more out of the portage tree just to get things where I want them due to lack of (or lack of knowledge of) install-time options.

Something else I've noticed is that when you install pine with portage, pico behaves like it's drunk. It'll shuffle the characters you've typed out of order if you type quickly (sometimes AFTER the fact, ie: You type H and then i, and the H suddenly jumps in front of the i you just typed)... and the backspace key won't bring you back up to the next line. It starts behaving like a delete when you reach the left side of the screen.

Installing pine manually fixes this.

This is all really starting to make me wonder... what if my system-critical programs are just as quirky and are going to destroy something I need later?

I need to get my spare machine working and try out Sorcerer GNU/Linux alongside Gentoo... see which one is a better fit for me.

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## Nick

Thats interesting. One thing portage seems to lack is a decent readme on the install options used in each package- just a list of gotchas like this would be great.

I guess you could submit a new procmail ebuild called procmail-mbox or something?

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## Target

Simple enough... It's the exact same .ebuild, but with a sed line removed. :p

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## rizzo

 *Target wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Something else I've noticed is that when you install pine with portage, pico behaves like it's drunk. It'll shuffle the characters you've typed out of order if you type quickly (sometimes AFTER the fact, ie: You type H and then i, and the H suddenly jumps in front of the i you just typed)... and the backspace key won't bring you back up to the next line. It starts behaving like a delete when you reach the left side of the screen.
> 
> Installing pine manually fixes this.
> ...

 

I noticed this exact behavior.  Made me switch to using vim as my pine editor.  While I love vim for file editing, I'm very used to pico for pine email and so it's almost more of a pain in the ass to use vim, mainly because it doesn't start you in insert mode.

Anyone know why pine goes flaky in the first place?

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## lx

 *Target wrote:*   

> I need to get my spare machine working and try out Sorcerer GNU/Linux alongside Gentoo... see which one is a better fit for me.

 

Tried sorcerer a few times it has potentional but it lacked version management. A few other times the package system got messed-up and I had to re-install everything. Downloading while compiling is a very nice feature. It also maintaince a list of installed files by make install, so some packages only give a description and location of the source (like emacs) that's cool, but installing directly into the root tree is propably why it broke my system in the first place. They should build a mix of the two,.........keep dreaming......, well maybe they have improved but the whole mess with sorcerer splitting up in sorcery linux (or something) and lunar, it just ain't mature....... well I stick with gentoo for now (sorcerer doesn't use gcc 3.1).

Cya, report how it functions, and you might convince me to switch, lX

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