I was able to track down two coredumps from the first crash
while compiling pine via telnet. I switched to compiling 
fetchmail and never went back to pine. 

Here's some info from my telnet session:

$ pwd; ls -l *.core
/src/pkgsrc/mail/pine
-rw-------  1 root  wsrc  786432 Jan 26 15:53 make.core
$ cd work/pine4.53/pine
$ pwd; ls -l *.core
/src/pkgsrc/mail/pine/work/pine4.53/pine
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  434176 Jan 26 16:12 make.core
$ 

The trouble is i have no CLUE what to do with them. The one
thing i do know is that no one wants me to ship the files
off as an attachment so that these wonderful lumps of binary 
data can be duplicated a million times and choke up mail
servers everywhere! ;)

I wasn't able to get good Google search for a document that
would explain the finer points of using a coredump. I would
like to debug this trivial error as an exercise for when i
hit a major glitch later on. Could anyone out there give me
any pointers to some information i can read?

Thanks,
mykalFunk