# Pine/Maildir and folders...

## mgirard

So, I want to use pine with maildir support. I found out that despite the fact that their is an older pine-maildir ebuild the newer pine-4.50-r4 includes the maildir patch. So, I emerge the newest pine. 

Now, when I run pine for the first time it tells me it is creating ~/mail (?) and I wonder why. I have my ~/.maildir directory already and it has messages in it. Despite the fact that pine created a ~/mail directory it picked up on my ~/.maildir directory and my INBOX is fully populated.

So I'm pretty happy, until I find out that pine knows nothing about the directories in my ~/.maildir (.Sent, .Saved, .Sort, etc). So it is pretty useless in conjunction with courier-imap which stores it's folders as maildirs.

How can I make pine recognize couier-imap maildir directories as valid folders to copy messages to and from?   :Question:   :Question: 

-Mg

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## mgirard

Update:

I can get the folders to show up if I do the folders through IMAP (in the ~/.pinerc file I put):

```
folder-collections=Secure {mail.blahblah.org}INBOX.[]
```

but this requires me to type my password in again AND make a network connection just to read mail on the localhost. I really, really want to avoid doing it this way if possible. I mean, if pine can read my Inbox as a maildir, why not my folders to? Anyone have any suggesstions??

-Mg

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## robot boy

i have the same exact question/problem!

can't anyone post an answer?

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## upnix

What I did was make symlinks from the ~/mail directory to the ~/Maildir

directory.

So, in ~/mail:

ln -s ../Maildir/.OpenBSD OpenBSD

In pine, that'll give me a directory that looks like 'OpenBSD', and get

its messages from the IMAP directory.

A big pain if you've got lots of IMAP directories, but seems to work.

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## alec

Pine very nicely says that it cannot open /home/username/.maildir because it is not a selectable folder.

It was compiled with the maildir flag.

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## mgirard

 *upnix wrote:*   

> What I did was make symlinks from the ~/mail directory to the ~/Maildir
> 
> directory.
> 
> So, in ~/mail:
> ...

 

Hmm. Does that really work? Does pine know to treat those folders as Maildirs even though they are in the ~/mail/ directory? I'll probably try it anyway, but I don't think it is going to work well for me because I have my mail sorted in folders and sub-folders. 

Even if it does work it feels like sort of a backwards approach to the problem. I mean, if pine reconizes and can read/write INBOX as a maildir, why not any number of subfolders as well? Maybe I'll look into creating a new patch for the pine source code...

-Mg

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## pkxl2

Same problem right here.

I upgraded from uucp<->postfix<->mbox to maildir, for the sake of higher performance.

My procmail did sort different mailinglists etc into different mbox'es in my ~/mail dir

```

~

|-- mail/

     |- Mailinglist1

     |- Mailinglist2

     |- ML3-Folder/

         |- ML3-1

         |- ML3-2

     |- Spam-Folder/

         |- lowspam

         |- highspam

```

and the like.

now i got the whole structure into ~/.maildir

```

~

|-- .maildir/

     |- .mailinglist1/

     |- .ML3-Folder.ML3-1/

     |- .ML3-Folder.ML3-2/

...

```

procmail does sort it nicely, and by connecting to Courier-IMAP, I got my old Folder-structure as usual.

But now my pine cannot access the folders (except INBOX) any more.

Is there anything I can do to get PINE to read these folders like my old ~/mail/ mbox-folders, without connecting to local IMAP and subscribe the folders

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## pkxl2

It's getting a habit. I work on a problem for a day, then post it in the forum. And five minutes after the post I find the problem's solution by accident.

Ok, pine seems to understand maildir folders other than inbox natively.

I soft-linked a maildir from ~/.maildir to ~/mail, and voila, it all showed up  :Smile: 

I think I have to drink some troll-cure now.....

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## amanset

 *pkxl2 wrote:*   

> It's getting a habit. I work on a problem for a day, then post it in the forum. And five minutes after the post I find the problem's solution by accident.
> 
> Ok, pine seems to understand maildir folders other than inbox natively.
> 
> I soft-linked a maildir from ~/.maildir to ~/mail, and voila, it all showed up 
> ...

 

I'm having a bit of difficulty understand what link you did, do you think you could explain it in a bit more detail? (I tried ln -s /home/<username>/mail/ maildir but I can't get anything to work in Pine).

With your solution is the mail stored in ~/.maildir or ~/mail?

What did you type into inbox-path field in the Pine setup?

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## pkxl2

Hi,

ok I think I got a lil' bit short on that.

```

pkxl2    users          35 Jan 19 21:50 [HPTeam] -> /home/pkxl2/.maildir/.mln.[HPTeam]/

pkxl2    users          33 Jan 19 21:50 [Orga] -> /home/pkxl2/.maildir/.mln.[Orga]/

pkxl2    users          33 Jan 19 21:50 [Team] -> /home/pkxl2/.maildir/.mln.[Team]/

pkxl2    users          32 Jan 24 20:32 [mln7] -> /home/pkxl2/.maildir/.mln.[mln7]

```

This is a subdir in my ~/mail

you have to soft-link every maildir subfolder you want to see in pine's folders.

Ah, and I think you have to use pine-maildir ebuild (or a similarly patched pine)

```

*  net-mail/pine-maildir

      Latest version available: 4.56

      Latest version installed: 4.56

```

Sorry for the late answer, I do not have plenty of time to surf the web these times.

----------

