mail folders

[Roderick]

alpine creates a directory mail with folders "Drafts", "sent-mail", etc.

Are this normal mailboxes that I can read and precess with BSD mail?

Namely with "mail -f ~/mail/sent-mail" ?

Or are there compatibility problems if I delete some messages?

Thanks
Rodrigo

[Roderick]

My previous question may sound strange. Well, the directory ~/mail may be
important to keep the folder with copies of mail sent, but very
seldon I read mails there. For reading local folders I always
used BSD mail.

Since I use pine/alpine, perhaps 23 years, it is only for reading
remote folders. I like it very much and do not know a better alternative:
it does not download all messages, but only what one wants to read,
and if one reads a message, it downloads an attachment only when one
wants it. And this is in my oppinion the big advantage of imap.

Other mail clients seem to download all mails and perhaps synchronize
remote with local. That is other approach, not so interesting for me.
Can alpine also do that?

Rodrigo

[Eduardo Chappa]

Post by Roderick
Other mail clients seem to download all mails and perhaps synchronize
remote with local. That is other approach, not so interesting for me.
Can alpine also do that?

No, Alpine does not offer an offline reading mode, all operations are
online.

[Eduardo Chappa]

Post by Roderick
alpine creates a directory mail with folders "Drafts", "sent-mail", etc.
Are this normal mailboxes that I can read and precess with BSD mail?
Namely with "mail -f ~/mail/sent-mail" ?
Or are there compatibility problems if I delete some messages?

There should not be any issue processing these folders with other
programs. The default format for folders in Alpine is the unix format,
which is the same as the one supported by the mail program, however, the
mail program will find a first meta message in your folders, that while it
is there, it is not displayed by Alpine, but displayed by other programs.