I've used pine and alpine since I defenestrated to linux 29 years ago. I
have two domains: business and personal. The alpine Incoming-Folders
collection has, in addition to INBOX, nicknames for the mbox files in the
'mail' folders collection.

All personal incoming and stored messages are in the ~/mail/personal file.
That file used to have the nickname, 'personal,' in the Incoming-Folders
collection ... which I accidently deleted last Friday.

I want to add a nickname of the personal file back in the Incoming-Folders
collection but my web searches (and a NetworkAdmin friend's help efforts)
have not found a way to do this.

Your help is needed as I'm out of ideas and my friend has used only Maildir
the past couple of decades.

TIA,

Rich

On Mon, 27 Jul 2026, Rich Shepard wrote:
> I've used pine and alpine since I defenestrated to linux 29 years ago. I

Different "Alpine" -- ITYM the email client:

 https://mailman23.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/alpine-info

> I want to add a nickname of the personal file back in the Incoming-Folders
> collection but my web searches (and a NetworkAdmin friend's help efforts)
> have not found a way to do this.

I don't know if the Alpine MUA supports "nicknames". But maybe play around 
with symbolic links, so directories (folders) show up under different 
names?

C.
-- 
BOFH excuse #225:

It's those computer people in X {city of world}.  They keep stuffing things up.

On Thu, 6 Aug 2026, Christian Kujau wrote:

> I don't know if the Alpine MUA supports "nicknames". But maybe play around
> with symbolic links, so directories (folders) show up under different
> names?

Christian,

Both pine and alpine support nicknames. These are names in the incoming
folder that display the contents of the related file in the mail folder.

The Mailbox message format places each message in a separate file in the
appropriate directory. The mbox format places all messages in a single file
in ~/mail/.

For example, here the 'statistics' nickname in the incoming folder accesses
all messages in ~/mail/r.

I'm going to try an idea this coming weekend and will report results.

Thanks,

Rich

On Mon, 27 Jul 2026, Rich Shepard wrote:

> I've used pine and alpine since I defenestrated to linux 29 years ago. I
> have two domains: business and personal. The alpine Incoming-Folders
> collection has, in addition to INBOX, nicknames for the mbox files in the
> 'mail' folders collection.

I discovred that alpine does not now allow nicknames for mbox files.

My solution: modify ~/.procmailrc so all messages to my personal domain are
placed in my INBOX. Those I want to save I'll do so in ~/mail/personal just
as I manually save client files in ~/mai/.

Rich