I was happily using pine for email (I know, not totally "debian"), but played with emacs, just to check it out. After _sending_ an email from emacs, I gained directories - harmless enough. After _reading_ email in emacs, my pine inbox, which had about 500 messages in it, is empty. Where'd they go? Patrick -- Patrick Wiseman pwiseman@mindspring.com Linux user #17943 *Google First, Ask Later*