[Alpine-info] Migrating to a cloud email server , trying to preserve Alpine experience for "local" end users.

[Kevin Long]

Greetings.  I work as a Sr. Computer Specialist for the University of
Washington dept. of Statistics . We are in the process of migrating
all of our email users (@stat.washington.edu)  off of our local
UW-imapd Debian Linux server,  onto cloud services provided by the UW.
 I have been migrating all of the users to Outlook.com which is the
microsoft provided cloud email service.


For users of thunderbird, outlook, etc, the process has been
relatively painless.  I use a tool called imapsync to copy all of
their IMAP messages and folders to the new server and then reconfigure
their email client to point to the new IMAP email box.



With alpine,  I am confused about what exactly is going on, and how to
best try to preserve the current user experience.


Here is what I know:


Our Alpine users SSH to a linux system called madrid and invoke
Alpine. They are then prompted for IMAP credentials for our mailserver
which is called mailhost.   I believe they are prompted for this
automatically even if they have not configured their Alpine for any
particular account, because of the /etc/pine.conf file on Madrid
(relevant sectiosn pasted below).

Heres where it gets tricky:  Our server "mailhost" is ALSO where the
user's NFS-mounted home directories physically reside, and each
homedirectory has a folder called ~/mail/ .



>From what I have seen, the users must input their IMAP credentials

before they can proceed with using their email, however, all of their
folders are in "Local folders in mail".  I believe  they are working
with folders which are not "subscribed" via IMAP.



I have successfully connected Alpine to the outlook.com server over
IMAP, but I had to set up collection lists for folders etc, and the
user experience was not quite the same.


If the current users are working with "Local folders in mail" , is
this not operating over IMAP and instead reading the mail directly
from the (NFS mounted) filesystem as the MTA dropped it off into their
home directory? If so, why  must they input IMAP credentials to move
forward with seeing these messages?



Regards,

Kevin Long










#      /etc/pine.conf -- system wide pine configuration
#
# Values here affect all pine users unless they've overidden the values
# in their .pinerc files.  A copy of this file with current comments may
# be obtained by running "pine -conf". It will be printed to standard output.
#
# For a variable to be unset its value must be null/blank.  This is not the
# same as the value of "empty string", which can be used to effectively
# "unset" a variable that has a default or previously assigned value.
# To set a variable to the empty string its value should be "".
# Switch variables are set to either "yes" or "no", and default to "no".
# Except for feature-list items, which are additive, values set in the
# .pinerc file replace those in pine.conf, and those in pine.conf.fixed
# over-ride all others.  Features can be over-ridden in .pinerc or
# pine.conf.fixed by pre-pending the feature name with "no-".
#
# (These comments are automatically inserted.)

# Over-rides your full name from Unix password file. Required for PC-Pine.
personal-name=

# Sets domain part of From: and local addresses in outgoing mail.
user-domain=stat.washington.edu

# List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Pine uses sendmail.
smtp-server=mailhost.stat.washington.edu

# NNTP server for posting news. Also sets news-collections for news reading.
nntp-server=news.u.washington.edu

# Path of (local or remote) INBOX, e.g. ={mail.somewhere.edu}inbox
# Normal Unix default is the local INBOX (usually /usr/spool/mail/$USER).
inbox-path={mailhost.stat.washington.edu/ssl}inbox

# List of folder pairs; the first indicates a folder to archive, and the
# second indicates the folder read messages in the first should
# be moved to.
incoming-archive-folders=

# List of folders, assumed to be in first folder collection,
# offered for pruning each month.  For example: mumble
pruned-folders=

# Over-rides default path for sent-mail folder, e.g. =old-mail (using first
# folder collection dir) or ={host2}sent-mail or ="" (to suppress saving).
# Default: sent-mail (Unix) or SENTMAIL.MTX (PC) in default folder collection.
default-fcc=

# Over-rides default path for saved-msg folder, e.g. =saved-messages (using 1st
# folder collection dir) or ={host2}saved-mail or ="" (to suppress saving).
# Default: saved-messages (Unix) or SAVEMAIL.MTX (PC) in default collection.
default-saved-msg-folder=

# Over-rides default path for postponed messages folder, e.g. =pm (which uses
# first folder collection dir) or ={host4}pm (using home dir on host4).
# Default: postponed-msgs (Unix) or POSTPOND.MTX (PC) in default fldr coltn.
postponed-folder=

# If set, specifies where already-read messages will be moved upon quitting.
read-message-folder=

# If set, specifies where form letters should be stored.
form-letter-folder=

# Contains the actual signature contents as opposed to the signature filename.
# If defined, this overrides the signature-file. Default is undefined.
literal-signature=
# Over-rides default path for signature file. Default is ~/.signature
signature-file=

# List of features; see Pine's Setup/options menu for the current set.
# e.g. feature-list= select-without-confirm, signature-at-bottom
# Default condition for all of the features is no-.
feature-list=enable-full-header-cmd,
       enable-unix-pipe-cmd,
       enable-bounce-cmd,
       enable-alternate-editor-cmd,
       enable-tab-completion,
       enable-apply-cmd,
       enable-flag-cmd,
       enable-zoom-cmd,
       enable-mail-check-cue,
       save-will-advance,
       use-current-dir,
       enable-aggregate-command-set,
       enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiation,
       enable-8bit-nntp-posting,
       enable-search-and-replace,
       enable-reply-indent-string-editing,
       signature-at-bottom,
       enable-dot-folders,
       enable-msg-view-urls,
       enable-msg-view-web-hostnames,
       enable-dot-files,
       enable-newmail-in-xterm-icon,
       enable-suspend,
       show-plain-text-internally