[Alpine-info] mail spool inbox copied to user home 'mbox'

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2011, David Trammell wrote:


:) I have a few users using Alpine, but I don't know much about it.  One 

:) user's main inbox in the mail spool is being copied to his home 

:) directory in the mbox file.  I've seen this before though not recently.  

:) What is the cause of this so we can avoid it in the future?


There is an access *method* to e-mail, which consists in moving mail from 
spool to mbox, and read messages from mbox. In order for this to happen, a 
file called "mbox" must exist in the home users directory, which must be 
in the unix format (one in which every messag is separated with a line 
starting with From....).

You can disable this from happening, by adding the following line to the 
.pinerc file of the user:

disable-these-drivers=mbox

this will disable moving the mail from the spool; messages that are 
already in the mbox file will not be visible after this is done, so if 
this is desired, one needs to move these messages to some folder and then 
(after disabling the mbox driver) back to the inbox, if that is what is 
desired.

I hope this helps you.

-- 
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/alpine/