Understanding Pine incoming-folders and incoming-archive-folders

Beartooth and I are in the midst of setting up his system so he 
can 1) use Pine to access multiple IMAP accounts and 2) run Pine 
on multiple computers. My goal is to *not* simply walk him 
through setting this all up. Instead I want him to understand 
what's going on (and I think that's what Beartooth wants too). 
Before we can continue, there are three things that are 
essential to understand:

   * Pine's primary collection
   * Pine's Incoming-Folders collection
   * Pine's incoming-archive-folders variable

I've updated my Power Pine page to try to make these clear, but 
I am sure that what I've written can be improved. Please read 
the following sections of my Power Pine page and post any 
questions or comments you have about this. I know it is 
confusing!

   Pine's primary collection
   <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/pc/#collectionTips>

The first bullet in this "Collection Tips" section discusses the 
Pine "primary folder collection". Understanding this will, I 
hope, help you to understand some of the problems you 
(Beartooth) are having with your incoming-archive-folders.

  Using the Incoming-Folders Collection (aka Pine Shortcuts)
  <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/pc/#recentIF>

I've rewritten a lot of this section to try to make Pine 
incoming-folders more clear. I think that a big part of the 
confusion that Beartooth and lots of other people are having is 
that "Incoming-Folders" is a misleading name. To me, a better 
name would be something like "Pine Shortcuts". Here is the 
salient point from the updated section:

Important: Any folder that you add to your incoming-folders list 
must already exist. Incoming folders are nicknames (aka 
shortcuts) to pre-existing folders.

(This is so important that I even use the <blink> tag!)

   Using Pine's incoming-archive-folders Variable
   <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/pc/#mvArchive>

The salient parts to understand in this section are 1) that 
incoming-archive-folders are intimately connected to 
incoming-folders and 2) the following tip.

Tip: To avoid problems when (if) you change your Pine primary 
collection, you may want to use a fully qualified folder 
specification to specify the second part (the archive folder) of 
an incoming-archive-folders pair.

Please read the above 3 sections and post any comments or 
questions about these confusing Pine concepts and/or about what 
I've written.

This discussion is open to all, not just Beartooth and me!

Thank you,
Nancy