Forcing Pine to reply-to-list (was: Evolution sucks??)

[Ben Scott]

On 2/12/07, TARogue <tom at tarogue.net> wrote:
> Pine. Because I know all the commands.

  Yah, me too... tried mutt once or twice, was irritated that I
couldn't get it to do what I wanted to [6][7], since it seemed really
powerful.  One thing Pine does better then just about anything I've
used is provide lots of hand-holding for the total newbies, but still
do a good job at getting out of your if you ask it to, and provide a
fair dose of "power user" functionality.  Pine was the first *nix
program I ever really used.

  As of late, I've switched to Gmail, just because it's so damn
convenient.  But I still miss Pine.

  MH and friends always appealed to me, but they don't work with IMAP
at all, which was always a deal-breaker for me.  Of course, here I am
using Gmail, which also doesn't work with IMAP at all....  :-/

> Except how to reply only to gnhlug, and not everyone else without
> editing the "To: " and "Cc: " lines.

  I did this by sorting all GNHLUG mail into an incoming folder (using
procmail), and then using a Pine Role to make all replies to mail in
that folder get addressed to the list posting address only.  From my
.pinerc file back then:

patterns-roles=LIT:pattern="/NICK=gnhlug/PARTIC=discuss at gnhlug.org,gnhlug-discuss/FLDTYPE=EMAIL"
action="/ROLE=1/REPL=gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org/FCC=lists\/gnhlug/SIG=.disclaimer/CSTM=To:
gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org,Mail-Reply-To:
bscott at ntisys.com,Cc:,Mail-Followup-To:
gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org/RTYPE=YES/FTYPE=YES/CTYPE=NO"

  As I recall, that breaks down to...

patterns-roles=
	Pine config file declaration

LIT:
	Magic.

pattern="
	Begins the definition of the pattern to look for to trigger this thing.

NICK=gnhlug
	nickname of the Role (or is it of the Pattern?)

/PARTIC=...
	List of participants to match on.  In this case, the list posting
address and an alias.

/FLDTYPE=EMAIL"
	More magic.  "Folder type is email" is the obvious meaning, but what
*else* would the folder type be?  News,  maybe?  The quote closes the
"pattern" declaration.

action="
	Action to take when the pattern matches.

/ROLE=1
	Magic.  Would appear to mean this is Role 1, or should use Role 1, or
something, but all of my rules from said .pinerc file use the same
"ROLE=1", and I cannot find anything else that mentions Roles, so...?

/REPL=gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
	Explicitly sets "Reply-To" to be the list posting address, because I
wanted to discourage off-list replies to my mail (take *that*,
anti-munging weenies! [2]).  Leave out if you prefer not to do that.

/FCC=lists\/gnhlug
	Saves mail to my list folder for the gnhlug-discuss list.  FCC is
Pine-speak ("Folder Carbon Copy") for save-to-file.  The slash (/) is
a directory separator, and has to be escaped with a backslash (\),
since this .pinerc context uses slash as a command flag.

/SIG=.disclaimer
	At the time, I used a disclaimer sig instead of my corporate sig in list email.

/CSTM=...
	Force custom mail headers.

To: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
	Force mail to be sent to list posting address.

Mail-Reply-To: bscott at example.com
	Suggest explicit off-list replies be sent to my personal address. [5]

Cc:
	Blank CC field.  I hate List Header Cancer [1].

Mail-Followup-To: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
	Suggest list posting address.  (At one time, the GNHLUG list server
didn't do this automatically.)

/RTYPE=YES/FTYPE=YES/CTYPE=NO"
	Magic.  I forget what these do.  The quote closes the "action" declaration.



  Everybody got that?  :-)


Footnotes
---------

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/gnhlug@zk3.dec.com/msg15581.html
[2] http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html [3]
[3] http://www.metasystema.net/essays/reply-to.mhtml [4]
[4] We've had this debate on this list already.  We voted.  "No munge" won.
[5] http://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html
[6] In fairness to mutt, I didn't try very hard.
[7] Footnotes are in order of writing, not appearance.

-- Ben