[Pan-users] Re: Pan not emailing me

[Beartooth]

On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:12:54 +0000, David Shochat wrote:
        [...]
> Got it. The key was what Duncan said, prompting me to look up the mailto
> protocol. As a first test, I set my pan Mail Reader Custom Command to:
> xmessage %s
> That was to see what exactly would be passed by pan. The most intriguing
> thing was that it included a literal %s followed by the mailto: URL,
> including subject and body. Therefore, we do NOT want the %s in there at
> all.

        OK. I tried just taking it out (with the single quotes still in. 
No joy -- not that that will surprise you.

> Then, experimenting with xfce4-terminal (same as your Terminal) with -e
> alpine, etc. I found that it had to have single quotes around the
> argument to the -e, just as Gerald L had said. Trouble is, you can't do
> that since pan is going to put the mailto: URL AFTER whatever command
> you specify in the preferences. 

        Probably irrelevant: why urls? Does Pan assume webmail is the 
only kind of mail there is?? For the record, there are some of us who 
detest all forms of it with a purple passion, and never touch any when we 
can manage any other way. That's part of the appeal of Pine/Alpine -- to 
me, certainly, and I believe to many others.

> So, again taking a tip from Duncan, I
> wrote the following little Perl glue program and called it
> alpine_helper.pl. Here it is:
> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
> use strict;
> my $url_from_pan = $ARGV[0];
> my $command = "xfce4-terminal -e 'alpine -url " . $url_from_pan . "'";
> system($command);
> 
> You will use Terminal instead of xfce4-terminal. Save this file and make
> it executable (chmod 755 alpine_helper.pl).

        OK. I did nano -w alpine_helper.pl, pasted that in, and changed 
the name of the app:

address@hidden ~]$ cat alpine_helper.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $url_from_pan = $ARGV[0];
my $command = "Terminal -e 'alpine -url " . $url_from_pan . "'";
system($command); 
address@hidden ~]$ chmod 755 alpine_helper.pl
address@hidden ~]$


> The whole point of this little program is to sneak the "alpine -url ",
> plus the URL passed by pan, inside the required pair of single quotes
> which have to surround the argument of the "-e" when you use Terminal
> (or xfce4-terminal in my case).

        OK; what I know of perl is how to spell it, period. I'll take 
your word for all that. But now I have a question.

> I put this program in my bin directory in my home directory, i.e.,
> /home/ david/bin. So in my pan preferences for the Mail Reader Custom
> Command, I just put:
> /home/david/bin/alpine_helper.pl
> That does the trick.

        I don't have any /home/btth/bin, nor even a /home/btth/.bin; do I 
just start with "mkdir bin"? Or does some wrinkle in Fedora mean I have 
to move it from /home/btth to some place like /usr/bin? Or do I just 
leave it where it is, without any bin directory? Or what? Where is 
Fedora's version of Pan going to look for it??

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.