Quota Fixin' -- what to do when you're "over quota"

Default Fix

Most likely, your problem is that you've got so much mail saved up that you're over quota. This section will guild you through fixing that problem. The rest of the page will go into further detail; read it only if you run into problems or are otherwise curious.

Log in...

Log in to the Unix machine (probably harper), but do not start Pine.
Use space to see the largest files in your directory. Look for entries at the top of the screen that are like ./mail/friends or ./mail/sent-mail-feb-1998. If you don't see anything of that form, then it will take more exploring to figure out what to compress. If it's sent-mail, skip the next steps in Pine, you won't need them.

In Pine...

Once you find a good candidate, remember it, and go into Pine.
Our next step is to divide that folder into two folders. We want to save the 20 or 30 messages, or whichever ones are still needed for quick access.
Turn on the feature "enable-aggregate-command-set". This allows you to select a bunch of messages, based on date, number, even who they're from.
Go to the folder that you chose earlier, and make sure you're in the folder index. Hit the semi-colon to use the select feature. If you've got 300 messages, you may want to just select the first 250. To do so, you'd type:
; n 1-250
Then hit return. To see which messages have been selected, hit z for zoom.
To move these messages to a different folder, hit a for apply (the next command will then apply to all the selected messages, not just the one that your ccursor is on). Then hit s for save, and use old-friends, or whatever is appropriate, for the folder to save to. It'll ask if you want to create that folder, say yes.
Go to the other folder to make sure you've moved everything you thought you did. Then go back and expunge the deleted messages from the original folder by typing x and then y.

At the shell...

cd to mail
zip -9m .old-foldername.zip old-foldername1

NOTE: If the hard quota is met, you'll have to move stuff to /tmp first...

PINE tools

As large gobs of mail are one of the most common ways of reaching a quota, I'll deal with some of the features of Pine that help you move and archive lots of messages.

From the main menu of Pine, go to Setup, then Config. You should now be in the Setup Configuration Menu, where you'll see first a list of settings, most of which shouldn't be changed. After them are a longer list of advanced features which you can toggle on (X) or off ( ). To find a specific feature, hit W for Whereis, and type in a word to search for. If you are curious what these various features do, Hit ? (or Ctrl-G) to see the online help.

enable-aggregate-command-set: If this obfuscatory phrase means nothing to you, you are not alone. Basically it allows you to use Pine's Select feature, activated by hitting the semi-colon, ";", in any Folder Index.

UNIX tools

zip: USE: zip -9m /tmp/me/mail.zip sent-mail*; zip adds the files indicated in the second argument to the zip file indicated in the first. If the zip file doesn't exist, zip creates it. Otherwise, it will add, and/or update (aka replace) files with the same names as those in the second argument. Be careful! The options here are not crucial, but convenient. The 9 indicates the highest level of compression, at the loss of speed of (de)compression. The m stands for 'move'; zip will delete the source files after adding them to the zip file. This is fairly safe, as zip makes sure the zip file is successfully created (or added to) before deleting.
space: USE: space; space is not (as far as I know) a program for UNIX. Rather, it is a suggested alias for a string of otherwise obnoxious commands, which becomes very useful when dealing with quotas. Either on the command line, or in a .login file (if you want it to work next time), type the following: alias space 'du -a | sort -nr | less' This causes the word 'space' to execute the commands that follow it. A detailed explanation of du, sort, and less are not appropriate here. Space gives a list of files and directories (relative to the current directory in this version) sorted by size. The first line, then, will list the total space taken up by the current directory and it's subdirectories.
mv: USE: mv /tmp/me/mail.zip ~/mail/.mail.zip; mv, for move, is a simple unix shell command that moves a file (or directory) to a different name. That is, renaming a file is simply moving it to a different name in the same directory, a special case of move.
cp: USE: mv /tmp/me/mail.zip ~/mail/.mail.zip; cp, for copy, is another simple Unix command. It does the same thing as move, except that it leaves the original in place.
mkdir: USE: mkdir /tmp/me; mkdir, for make directory, allows you to create a directory in any directory where you have write permission. These include your own directory, and /tmp.

For more Unix commands, check out these listings from NASA and ACS