[Alpine-info] weird behavior in saving messages from one folder to another

[Benjamin R. Haskell]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008, Jacob Wegelin wrote:


>

> I went into saved-messages, which contained 2156 messages.

>

> $ d  -- to sort them by date

>

> The first few messages look like this:

>

>  A    1 02/26/2003 james levy                                    (25K) Re: 

> seeking Swiss German language instruction + A    2 02/26/2003 james levy 

> (19K) Re: seeking Swiss German language instruction + A    3 02/26/2003 james 

> levy                                    (21K) Re: seeking Swiss German 

> language instruction +      4 06/06/2007 Debie Schilling 

> (5K) Requesting your May CTSC / CCRC Activity Reports +      5 08/09/2007 

> Elaine Odell

>

> Then I did

>

> ; a  -- to select all

>

> a s saved2008_06_30  y -- to save a copy of every message in the newly-sorted 

> message folder to a new folder, which is supposed to be sorted by date.

>

> Then I went into saved2008_06_30  and did

>

> ctrl w ctrl y -- to go to the first few messages. This is what I see:

>

>

>       1 08/28/2007 Mail Delivery System                           (2K) 

> Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender + A    2 Jan  4     Ryan Schmidt 

> (6K) Re: error installing DarwinPorts or MacPorts: no acceptable C compiler - 

> 3 Jan  5     To: apu1 at weibell.no                            (8K) Re: 

> [Alpine-info] how to set up alpine to receive and send email + A    4 Jan  5 

> macports-users-request at lists.macosforge.org    (3K) confirm 

> 16400e633959fc13453a2da52453baeff28cdadd +      5 Jan  5 

> macports-users-bounces at lists.macosforge.org    (2K) You have been 

> unsubscribed from the macports-users mailing list -      6 Jan  5     To: 

> Ryan Schmidt

>

>

> Both folders have the same number of messages. It appears that no messages 

> have been *dropped*; it's just that in the process of copying them to a new 

> folder, they are unsorted, or re-sorted.

>

> Is there a better way to permanently sort the messages in a pine "folder"?

>

> Jake


Perhaps you have the following set?

   [ Advanced User Preferences ]
...
       [ ]  Save Combines Copies (may be out of order)


The help text:

                      FEATURE: Save Combines Copies (may be out of order)

This feature will optimize an aggregate copy operation, if possible, by 
issuing a single IMAP COPY command with a list of the messages to be 
copied. This feature is set by default. This may reduce network traffic 
and elapsed time for the Save. However, many IMAP servers (including the 
UW IMAP server) do not preserve the order of messages when this 
optimization is applied. If this feature is not set, Alpine will copy each 
message individually and the order of the messages will be preserved.