ALL ABOUT PINE^®:
POP, IMAP, NNTP, & ESMTP CLIENT
FOR UNIX, WINDOWS, & MAC OS X

History of the Pine Program and Its Name

The University of Washington Office of Computing & Communications created Pine in 1989 as a user-friendly character-based mail client for Unix. Pine version 1 was released to the public in 1991 and was the first IMAP client “that had more than a 2-digit user community”!  Since then it has evolved into a powerful robust customizable standards-compliant IMAP and NNTP client that is used by millions of people around the world. The UW developed the latest version, 4.64, for MS Windows and many Unix flavours, including Mac OS X. It has been ported by others to many platforms, including OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, and VMS.

The title of this page, All About PINE: POP, IMAP, NNTP, & ESMTP, and the signature that I use in public postings might lead you to believe that PINE is an acronym for POP, IMAP, NNTP, & ESMTP, but it isn't! For all the gory details about the history of Pine and its name, see Laurence Lundblade's What “Pine” Really Stands For and the UW Pine Information Center's Pine Project History and Pine Release Chronology & Version Changes.

Why Use Pine

Millions of people use Pine. Some love it, some are ambivalent about it, and some scorn it. My goal in this “Why Use Pine” section is to explain why I'm a Pine fan and try to convince the skeptics to at least try the latest Pine, version 4.64. Below I discuss why some people think Pine is for wimps (and why they're wrong),  comparison of Pine and its main competitors,  why some people prefer pine (testimonials),  and Pine's philosophy,  features,  & sample commands.

Why Some People Think Pine is for Wimps

Pine has a reputation of being for wimps but in fact the current version, 4.64, is quite macho and it requires intelligence (which is often lacking in comp.mail.pine) to understand the documentation and to figure out how to use it optimally. The following are the main reasons that some people think Pine is for wimps.

• In the default configuration, all power features are turned off.
  
  
• In the default configuration, Pine asks for confirmation for a lot of actions including quitting and expunging. You can turn off these confirmation questions in the Pine Configuration screen.
  
  
• In the default configuration, the Pine startup screen is the Main Menu and a user needs to choose from this menu to get started. You can avoid this “splash screen” or “staging page” and go directly to reading your INBOX (or whatever you want to do) by either starting Pine with command-line arguments or by setting the initial-keystroke-list in your Pine Configuration.
  
  
• Most people do not understand the advantages of using IMAP as their Internet message access protocol and don't take advantage of Pine's IMAP featues. Because they don't use Pine's IMAP features, they don't appreciate that Pine is one of the most robust and mature IMAP clients.
  
  
• Most people don't know about many of the features that have been added to Pine during the last few years. For example, a lot of people don't know that Pine has aggregate commands, filtering, roles, scoring, and templates; lets you access multiple IMAP, NNTP, SMTP, & POP servers; lets you search specific headers or the full text of messages in a mailbox or search across multiple mailboxes; lets you store mailboxes, address books, signatures and pinerc files on IMAP servers; runs on MS Windows, Mac OS X, Amiga, VMS, BeOS, all flavors of Unix, and many other platforms; and has hundreds of settings that you can customize.
  
  
• In The Linux Mail User HOWTO, Eric Raymond perpetuates the Pine ignorance I describe above by saying that he finds Pine's “impoverished command set, limited configurability and native editor hard to take.” Pine has neither an impoverished command set nor limited configurability; and its native editor, Pico, can be replaced using Pine's editor variable, the enable-alternate-editor-cmd feature, and optionally the enable-alternate-editor-implicitly feature.

Below are some more reasons that some people are wary of Pine.

Pine and Pico Vulnerabilities in Older Versions

Pine, along with most other mail and news clients, has had some security and privacy vulnerabilities. Fortunately, the Pine team has quickly released patches to fix these problems and there are currently no known Pine vulnerabilities (as long as you practice safe computing). To find out more about security and privacy in Pine, see Security and Privacy Features below. To find out about past Pine and Pico vulnerabilities, see the following links.

• bugtraq: Pine 4.33 (at least) URL handler allows embedded commands.
  
  
• CERT® Advisory CA-1998-10 Buffer Overflow in MIME-aware Mail and News Clients
  
  
• message from Mark Crispin re: ipop3d (x2) / pine (x2) / Linux kernel (x2) / Midnight Commander (x2).
  
  
• SecurityFocus.com Vulnerabilities Database — (“You must enable Javascript for the vulnerability database to work,” but I recommend that you do not enable javascript in your browser because of the privacy and security vulnerabilities it introduces.)  If you have javascript enabled, set the vendor to University of Washington and then, after you get to the UW screen, set the title to Pine or Pico. The Pico page lists Pico 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 as all being vulnerable, but when the page was written there was no such thing as Pico 4.1, 4.2, or 4.3! In fact, the Pico vulnerabilities that SecurityFocus describes were fixed in Pico 4.0. Here is a table that lists which versions of Pine and Pico are bundled together and which have known vulnerabilities.
  
  

The Problem with Receiving an Email Message that Includes a Newsgroups Header Line

In 1995 when people were using Pine 3.90 and 3.91, if an email message contained a Newsgroups header, Pine interpreted this to mean that the message was posted to the newsgroups listed in that header. If a Pine user replied to this message, Pine asked if she wanted to post her reply to the newsgroup(s). Unfortunately, many newsreaders, including tin, trn, and nn, include the Newsgroups header in a message that is sent only via email. Those newsreaders include this header in email for informational purposes only. Because of this inconsistency in the interpretation of a Newsgroups header in an email messages, Pine 3.90 and 3.91 users sometimes responded publicly to a message that was sent only by email and intended to be private. This caused all kinds of flamage to be unleashed on Pine. You can read all about the fiasco and witness the flames in groups.google.com.

It is because of problems like this that Jamie Zawinski wrote the (now expired) Internet Draft Identification of messages delivered via both mail and news.

1996-2003: Problem Resolved

This problem was fixed in Pine 3.92, which was released on 18 March 1996, but in ...

2003: The Problem Returns

As discussed in this August-2003 thread in the pine-info mailing list, this problem re-appeared in Pine version 4.56 and is still present in the latest version of Pine (4.64). You can try to avoid it by using one of the following seven solutions.

1. Patch and rebuild Pine using Eduardo Chappa's patch to Fix a bug that makes Pine not to give a warning if the Newsgroup header is present.
2. Use a version of Pine that does not have this problem. (Does anyone know which is the most up-to-date version of Pine that does not have this problem???)
3. Turn off all NNTP posting in Pine by
   1. unsetting the nntp-server variable in Pine's Main > Setup > Config screen,
   2. and if you are using Pine 4.56 or later, unsetting the nntp-server variable in all your roles,
   3. and if you are using Pine 4.56 or later, unsetting the predict-nntp-server feature,
   4. and unsetting quell-extra-post-prompt so that if Pine is about to post to a newsgroup, you will be asked if you really want to do that.
4. (requires Pine 4.56 or later) Turn off NNTP posting in any role that can be used when the current folder type is Email by
   1. unsetting the nntp-server variable in Pine's Main > Setup > Config screen,
   2. and unsetting the nntp-server variable in all your roles that can be used when the current folder type is Email. In other words, set the nntp-server variable only in roles that have the current folder type set to either News or Specific newsgroups,
   3. and unsetting the predict-nntp-server feature. (This may not be necessary since Pine should not be able to predict the NNTP server when the current folder type is Email.)
   4. and unsetting quell-extra-post-prompt so that if Pine is about to post to a newsgroup, you will be asked if you really want to do that.
5. Route your incoming mail messages through this Procmail recipe, which renames the Newsgroups header if it exists in an incoming mail message.
6. Route your incoming mail messages through a Procmail recipe that adds a  Followup-To: poster  header if a Newsgroups header exists. This will prevent Pine from publicly posting a reply to a private email message, but unfortunately it will also prevent Pine from publicly posting a reply to a message that was both publicly posted and privately mailed.
7. (not practical for most Pine users) Mainly use Pine as a newsreader, i.e. for reading, replying to, and posting newsgroup messages, and never use Pine to reply to a message that is in a mailbox (i.e., a folder of type Email).

Note that solutions #5 and #6 solve the problem only for mail messages that have been processed by the relevant Procmail recipe. Any archived mail message that contains a Newsgroups header and did not pass through one of these, or similar, Procmail recipes will be vulnerable to this problem.

Comparison of Pine and Its Main Competitors

Pine's main strengths are that 1) it's a great IMAP client and 2) it's a great non-GUI mail client. If you are looking for a program that is both of these, then Pine is the program for you. If you are not so concerned about IMAP but you want a great non-GUI mail client, then Pine's main competitor is Mutt. If you want a great IMAP client but you do not care whether it is console-based (non-GUI), then Mulberry, SeaMonkey Suite, and Thunderbird are Pine's main competitors. Below I compare Pine to these four programs.

The Non-GUI Arena: Mutt versus Pine

Some of the most vocal scorners of Pine are Mutt users. I sometimes consider switching to Mutt because it allows a user to redefine keys, it has a macro language, it can be run non-interactively so you can use it in a script, it uses an open development model (as opposed to Pine's more closed development model), and it's FLOSS. But I always come back to Pine because:

• Mutt does not support user-defined labels/keywords (or if it does, no one seems to know). For information about keywords, see Setting Up Keywords (Labels) on the Power Pine page and this item & the item below it in the section What to Look For in an IMAP Service Provider on my IMAP Service Providers page.
  
  
• Mutt's address books (AKA aliases) suck and the plug-in abook and Little Brother's Database (lbdb) do not have nearly the functionality of Pine address books. For example, you cannot store your Mutt personal address books on an IMAP server. This is especially useful for doing server-based greenlisting and bluelisting.
  
  
• In the message Re: Store mutt configuration on an IMAP server? in comp.mail.mutt, Michael Elkins said “Mutt does not have this functionality [storing config files on an IMAP server]. Pine does a pretty good job of this . . . ”
  
  
• As discussed in the thread Muttrc equivalent of /etc/pine.conf.fixed in comp.mail.mutt, Mutt cannot use a system-wide fixed configuration file. For details about why this is useful and how to set it up in Pine, see Compartmentalizing and Sharing Your Pine Configuration.
  
  
• Mutt has not been ported to MS Windows and I want to be able to use the same client on all the operating systems that I use. Mutt can run in Cygwin but it doesn't have all the features of Unix Mutt (problems with mailcap, urlview, and muttprint) and you don't get the GUI features that you get with PC-Pine.
  
  
• Mutt is not an NNTP client. If you are a purist who thinks that a program should do one and only one thing, and do it well, consider that a mailing list and a news group are functionally the same (from a user's perspective) and there is no reason that a program should do one and not the other. IMHO of course!
  
  
• Mutt does not let you specify an SMTP server because it assumes you have installed and want to use a local mailer daemon (sendmail, postfix, etc). This is especially a problem for people who are on a system with a dial-up connection to the Net because many spam fighting tools block mail that is sent directly from dial-ups. For more information about Mutt and SMTP, see the Mutt FAQ.
  
  
• Mutt does not support nicknames (aliases) for mailboxes. You can simulate nicknames with macros, but this is a pain compared to using Pine's incoming-folders and their nicknames.
  
  
• Mutt does not have built-in form letters, templates, roles, or filters. You can simulate roles with macros or folder-hooks, but these are a pain compared to Pine's roles.
  
  
• Mutt cannot search across multiple mailboxes.
  
  
• Mutt was not originally designed to be an IMAP client but instead has been retrofitted with some IMAP functionality. Because of this, it is does not have all the IMAP features and robustness that Pine has. For example:
  • mutt-users list: In the message Re: Mutt, imap and attachments, Michael Elkins said “There isn't any way to do this [not download attachments] with Mutt. It will always download the entire message and parse it locally. PINE might be a better option for you if this is important.”
  • comp.mail.mutt: Mutt is not able to search through a mailbox that is accessible only via IMAP
  • mutt-users list: Re: Mutt IMAP indexing slower than Pine?
  • mutt-users list: Re: imap behavior -- “Unfortunately for IMAP users, mutt does not have the concept of separate write-status-back-to-mailbox and purge-away-deleted-messages commands”
  • mutt-users list: the thread saved messages appear as "new"
  • comp.mail.mutt: In the 2005-Jan-14 message account-hook, Brendan Cully said that IMAP “supports things like server-side threading, sorting and searching, but mutt hasn't picked up on that yet.”
  • Many of Mutt's IMAP-related settings cannot be set for a specific IMAP server, but instead are set for all the IMAP servers to which Mutt connects. For example, this is the case with imap_delim_chars -- this is a problem if you access both UW IMAP and Courier IMAP servers and you want to be able to use dot (.) in the name of a mailbox on the UW server or forward slash (/) in the name of a mailbox on a Courier server.
  • IMAP passwords are stored in plain text in the .muttrc (using  set imap_pass=password)

See Also:

• Why Sven does not use Pine
•  my del.icio.us bookmarks related to Mutt

IMAP Arena 1: Mulberry versus Pine

News

2006-Aug-20: Mulberry is now free/gratis and version 4.0.5 has been released.

2005-Sep-30: Suspension of operations - details in the gmane.mail.mulberry.user thread immediate cessation of operations of Cyrusoft and in the Slashdot message Thanks and some inside dope from an inside dope by Matt Wall

2005-Sep-29: Mulberry 4.0.4

Mulberry is a powerful robust multi-platform IMAP client and I think of it as a complement to Pine rather than a competitor. Currently I use Pine for composing and sending IMAP & NNTP messages, and I use Mulberry to monitor my incoming mailboxes & alert me when a new message arrives, to do heavy duty searching through multiple local & IMAP-accessible mailboxes, to read high-volume infrequently-read mailboxes, and to rename and reorganize my mailboxes. So far, Pine and Mulberry play well together.

My complaints about Mulberry, compared to Pine, are that it . . .

• does not let me use an alternate editor in the Mac and MS-Windows versions; you can use an alternate editor in the Linux and Solaris versions
• does not display the From header when I'm composing a message (but it does display the name of the role I'm using); both Mozilla and Pine can be setup so that the From header is displayed and editable during composition
• inserts a line break in a long URL in a message that I send and then, unfortunately, people who are using Pine and many other messaging clients cannot simply click on the multi-line URL to view it (see my RFC 2396 Pine wish for more about this)
• does not do 8-bit ESMTP negotiation so a message that contains high ascii characters, such as the £ symbol, is encoded as quoted-printable
• does not have a way to easily open any mailbox on any IMAP server. You need to first go to Preferences and create an Account for the IMAP server. In Pine you can type G (for Go) and then specify any mailbox on any IMAP or NNTP server.
• does not have a way to score messages, and thus no option to view a score column in a mailbox index and no option to sort a mailbox by score (this is very useful for spam/non-spam separation)
• does not speak NNTP (both Pine and Mozilla do)
• is not as fast as Pine at downloading and displaying the message headers in a mailbox's index.
• does not buffer PageUp or PageDown keystrokes. In Pine I can press PageUp (or the minus key) 10 times, for example, and then go do other tasks and come back and Pine will have downloaded and moved up ten pages of headers in the mailbox index. In Mulberry, doing this downloads and moves up only one page of headers and the other 9 PageUp keystrokes are lost in the ether.

Other than that, Mulberry has a lot of features that Pine does not have including disconnected support, more powerful address-book lookup & auto expansion, LDAP authentication, more powerful mailbox searching especially across multiple mailboxes or using multiple search conditions, monitoring of IMAP and POP mailboxes and mailbox-specific alerts, text macros, nice PGP and S/MIME integration. Also it satisfies the first four items in my Pine philosophy list (standards-compliant, plug-and-play, cross-platform, uses non-proprietary mailbox formats). I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a GUI  IMAP client to complement Pine.

There are many others who recommend Mulberry and Pine as complementary IMAP clients including Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Duke University, Medical University of South Carolina, Oberlin College, SUNY Oswego, University of Bath, University of Bristol, University of Buffalo, University of Cambridge, University of Michigan, University of New Mexico, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Dallas, and University of Sussex. Please let me know of others.

See Also:

• the Mulberry section of the IMAP Service Providers page
•  my del.icio.us bookmarks related to Mulberry

IMAP Arena 2: SeaMonkey Suite and Thunderbird versus Pine

•   News
  • 2007-Mar-2: SeaMonkey Suite 1.1.1 (“surfing the net has never been so suite!”)
  • 2006-Dec-19: Thunderbird 1.5.0.9

The not-for-profit SeaMonkey Suite, and its for-profit Mozilla dot COM cousin Thunderbird, are multi-platform IMAP/POP/NNTP/LDAP clients. Thunderbird version 0.8+ is also a feed client. My complaints about Mozilla-based IMAP clients, compared to Pine, are that they . . .

• barely supports the IMAP \FLAGGED flag (aka "important" flag), which is specified in the IMAP RFC. For example, you cannot create views, searches, or filters based on the \FLAGGED flag. You can, however, "sort by flag" so that all flagged messages appear at the top or bottom of a mailbox's list of messages. If you would like to be able to view, search, or filter \FLAGGED messages in SeaMonkey Suite or Thunderbird, please vote for Bug 143085 - RFE: View-->Messages-->Flagged menu option desired and Bug 72823 - implement Select | Flagged messages. Pine and Mulberry support searches, filters, and views (zooms) based on the \FLAGGED flag.
• does not appear to support the IMAP \RECENT flag, which is specified in the IMAP specification. Moz is able to view "Recent Mail" but this has a completely different meaning from the IMAP meaning of RECENT. Pine and Mulberry support searches, filters, and views (zooms) based on the \RECENT flag.
• supports only 5 IMAP keywords (labels) and the Moz user interface displays at most one keyword per message. Pine and Mulberry support more than 5 keywords and are able to display multiple keywords for each message. If you would like to be able to use more than five keywords in SeaMonkey Suite or Thunderbird, please vote for Bug 114656 - allow arbitrary number of labels.
• loses keywords (labels) when a message is moved or copied from an IMAP or NNTP account to a either a different IMAP account or a local mailbox. This is discussed on the Known Issues for Mozilla 1.7 page in the General Mail and News Issues section.
• does not have an easy way to save a message to a mailbox that does not yet exist. This is easy in Pine and Mulberry.
• does not let me change the Fcc (Folder courtesy copy) while in the midst of composing a message. Changing the Fcc is easy in Pine and Mulberry.
• cannot remember that I always want threads expanded and thus I need to type * every time I open an NNTP group. (I prefer to have threads expanded because often there are unrelated topics buried inside a collapsed thread.)
• does not let me use an alternate editor. Mulberry for Linux and Pine on any platform can be set up to use an alternate editor.
• does not support bounce forward, which is useful for updating remote greenlists, bluelists, and other filter-related files using Procmail or Sieve running on a remote system. Most mail clients, including Pine and Mulberry, support bounce forwarding. If you would like to be able to bounce forward (aka redirect) messages in SeaMonkey Suite or Thunderbird, please vote for Bug 12916 - Allow bounce/redirect of mail messages.
• is not able to store personal address books on a remote server. This is especially useful for doing server-based greenlisting and bluelisting. Both Pine and Mulberry support server-based personal address books.
• does not support powerful searching or filtering of NNTP groups (but it does support powerful searching and filtering of IMAP groups). Pine supports powerful searching and filtering of both IMAP and NNTP groups.
• does not have keyboard shortcuts to hide/show the folder list. Note that there are lots of Mozilla keyboard shortcuts, for example F8 toggles the message pane, but there is no easy way to show/hide the folder-list pane. I posted a message about this desirable feature in netscape.public.mozilla.mail-news.

The things that I like about Moz compared to Pine are that it . . .

• lets you authenticate (using a BIND Distinguished Name) to an LDAP server. (Pine can access LDAP servers, but currently does not support LDAP authentication.)
• recovers nicely after disconnecting and reconnecting to the Net (which my access provider requires me to do every two hours)
• efficiently filters and flags messages based on the From, Subject, or Date header because these headers are cached locally
• remembers NNTP message flags between sessions (again because these headers are cached locally)
• remembers which messages I have already READ in public/shared IMAP mailboxes (again because headers are cached locally)
• nicely integrates with a web browser (this integration is especially nice if your web browser is either Firefox or SeaMonkey Suite, which is the case for me)
• supports the IMAP IDLE extension (starting with Mozilla Suite 1.7 and Thunderbird 0.6 as discussed in Bug 141369 - Support IMAP4 IDLE command (RFC 2177); neither Pine nor Mulberry currently support the IMAP IDLE extension
• is also an RSS/Atom client (starting with Thunderbird 0.8, Firefox 1.0PR and Mozilla Suite ???; neither Pine nor Mulberry are RSS/Atom clients)
• has an extension for managing Sieve scripts and there are bug reports and plans that discuss including Sieve support in a future version. Including Sieve support in Pine is my #2 Pine Wish, which I discuss below.
• has user and developer discussion groups that are more active than the Pine discussion groups
• uses an open development model — as opposed to Pine's more closed development model — and thus there
  • are lots of plug-ins
  • is an active development community that anyone can join

I'm starting to prefer Moz to Mulberry as my GUI complement to Pine, mainly because 1) Mulberry does not have smart local caching and 2) Mulberry does not support NNTP or RSS/Atom, both of which I use as much — or more — than IMAP.

See Also:

• the Mozilla section of the IMAP Service Providers page
•  my Mozilla-related del.icio.us bookmarks are under the following tags: Messaging/Clients/Thunderbird, Messaging/Clients/Moz, Moz/Extensions, and Browsers/Moz/Extensions (I need to consolidate these!)

Why Some People Prefer Pine: Praise for Pine

Essential Companion to Other Mail Clients and Tools

In the previous section, I described how I use Pine as my primary mail tool and Mulberry as a useful companion to Pine. Many people do the reverse of this and use Pine as a companion to their primary mail client. For example, Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome had problems accessing and deleting messages in his bloated 30 megabyte INBOX and he was able to solve the problem with Pine:

“My system administrator over at DigitalDaze told me to check out PC-Pine... I'm glad I did. It's wonderful! If you want to check your e-mail remotely (IMAP), this works great. It was the only thing I could use to delete all the unwanted messages on Lockergnome's server.”

You can read the rest of Chris's GnomeREPORT here or here (search for “Pine”).

Quick Visual Scanning of a “Catchall” Mailbox for Non-Spam Messages

I agree with Chris Pirillo (quoted in the previous section) that Pine is a great tool for cleaning out mailboxes, especially a “catchall” mailbox, which for me contains mostly spam. The way I deal with my catchall mailbox is to open it about once a week and sort (order) it in a way that makes it easy for me to scan the Pine Message Index and find the non-spam messages, if there are any.

Sort a Mailbox by Spam Score

If the messages in your catchall mailbox have been tagged with a spam score by a spam-detection tool, such as SpamAssassin, you can locate non-spam messages by sorting the mailbox by spam score using either Pine's

• sort by Subject ($S), if the spam score has been injected into the beginning of the Subject (and is not inside square brackets, which are ignored during an IMAP Subject sort);  or
  
  
• sort by Pine score ($E), if you have set up a Pine rule to set an appropriate Pine score based on the spam score
  

The non-spam messages should bubble to the top of the sort since they should have low spam scores. I discuss these techniques and more about my spam strategy in Using a MaybeSpam Mailbox and Reverse Spam Filtering: Winning Without Fighting.

Sort a Mailbox by Size

If you aren't able to have your catchall messages tagged with a spam score, you can sort the mailbox by size or reverse-size using  $Z  or   $Z$R  so that all messages that are essentially the same are grouped together. For me, non-spam messages are usually pretty small and the very large messages are all spam. Also, repeats of the same spam message are grouped together and easy to spot and delete.

	Scanning-For-Non-Spam Tips
	When my catchall mailbox contains a lot of messages, I ssh to a Unix system, fire up the remote Pine on my catchall mailbox, and sort and visually scan the mailbox there. I do this because my local machine has a slow dial-up connection to the Net and it's much faster to page through the Message Index using a remote Pine that's on a system that has a fast connection to the IMAP server. If you use Pine scores, you might want to include the SCORE token in your Pine index-format variable so that the score will be displayed in the Pine Message Index.

Miscellaneous Pine Praise

On 15 October 2002, reuben posted the following in the thread Can you advice me, an email software with IMAP?? at Emaildiscussions.com:

“PINE  ...  does everything that every other email client does. it is way more flexible, versatile, powerful, and lightweight. text based and slightly difficult to configure, but once you learn it, it's lightning fast, and you'll never want to use anything else again.”

On 4 April 2002, the following was posted at macosxhints.com by Anonymous in a hint titled A few scripts to help with Pine integration:

“I installed Pine on my OS X box, and love it. It is the only email program that can keep up with my volume of mail. It is text only, but there is nothing that can touch it for speed and power.”

The next is an excerpt of a message that was posted to the IMAP mailing list. It mentions how unusual Pine is because of its adherence to open standard protocols...

Message-Id: <72C5FDA4D9CC3045B80EA1B76DB86A99176B4F@DF-BOWWOW.platinum.corp.microsoft.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 13:06:24 -0800
From: "Larry Osterman" <larryo@Exchange.Microsoft.com>
To: "Mark Crispin" <MRC@cac.washington.edu>
Cc: "Marek Kowal" <kowalm@onet.pl>, <imap@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: Outlook express AUTH command

ObCaveat: Anyone who has read this list for any length of time knows I
strongly support open standard protocols.

[...]

Every vendor needs to make a decision at some point about supporting 
their customers vs. supporting standards. Just about every server 
I know of has made compromises in this area. Every client out there 
has its own areas that it violates the protocol (with the possible 
exception of PINE, I'm not aware of any violations in PINE). 

[...]
 

You can read the rest of this message and the entire (very interesting) thread in the IMAP mailing list archives on the web or via IMAP at imap://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap_archive.

Below is a message that was posted to comp.mail.mh about MH-formatted folders, IMAP, and Pine.

From: cmenzel@philebus.tamu.edu (Chris Menzel)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: mh as an imap backing store?
Date: 13 Feb 2001 16:40:48 GMT
Organization: Texas A&M University
Message-ID: <slrn98iosg.t5v.cmenzel@philebus.tamu.edu>
References: <3_Ug6.3622$bK4.1432018@typhoon.ne.mediaone.net>
Reply-To: cmenzel@tamu.edu

On Fri, 09 Feb 2001 16:34:07 GMT, Paul Fox
<pgf-spam@foxharp.boston.ma.us> said:
> some docs i found for the U of W imapd suggest that it can use
> mh folders as a backing store.  is this true?  can anyone comment
> on how well it works?  typically i use mh, but on the road it
> might be nice to be able to get at my mail via imap.
 
Well, I'm not sure what a backing store is, but I use mh folders and
access them via (secure) IMAP, both locally and remotely, using pine,
which does a spectacular job of handling mh folders as an imap client.
Pine, as you probably know, is also from UW, and was designed for IMAP
pretty much from the git go, so is really rock solid and *fast*.

[ deleted ]

-chris

You can read the rest of this comp.mail.mh discussion at groups.google.com.

In Satya's review of Pine at FreeOS.com, he says:

“Pine is fast, reliable, can handle tons of mail and is flexible too.  ...  Pine is an excellent email client and this writer recommends it to anyone who spends more than 5 minutes a day on email.”

In his IMAP Client Perspectives page, Tom Karches of North Carolina State University's Information Technology Systems says PC-Pine is the:

• fastest PC-based IMAP client I have seen
• most usable client over a dial-up link with respect to speed

Here is a message that was posted to the Slashdot poll on “Which email client do you use?”.

Re:If a tree falls in the woods... (Score:3, Insightful) by dattaway (dattaway@attaway.org) on Wednesday July 14, @10:57AM EDT (#25) (User Info) http://soho.attaway.org

I have used Pine since 1995 and its the only mail program I have used that has never gave me any problems, such as hijacking my mail spool that I like to grep. I still have my old email archives, unlike those lost from the viral adventures of windowsland eudora and friends. It has an interface that is telnet friendly over cell phone or from work. Its menu is simple and productive through keystrokes, unlike groupwise that curses me at work. I have tried other mail programs than Pine, but many seem to hijack the mail spool and assimilate it into their own strange format. So, I stick with trusty old Pine.
 

Here is a message posted to comp.mail.pine by Mark Crispin, the inventor of IMAP.

From: Mark Crispin <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU>
Subject: Re: Why using pine?
Date: 11 Dec 1999 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <Pine.NXT.4.30.9912110030430.954-100000@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU>
References: <3851E972.AA89E3CD@fl.net.au>
Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing
Newsgroups: comp.mail.pine

On Sat, 11 Dec 1999, Andrei Tchepurnyh wrote:
> I am just wondering why people using Pine.
> Is it a better mail-program or what? I've tried Pine on PC and found
> that Netscape is much easier to use for me. But why so many people are
> still using Pine?

Pine is a much better mail program than Netscape.

Pine has fewer bugs and is much more reliable.  Read comp.mail.imap for a
taste of the ongoing problems people have with Netscape.

Pine is much faster.  Pine consistantly measures as being one of the
fastest (if not THE FASTEST) IMAP clients available.  Pine is one of the
few IMAP clients which works well over dialups and radio links.

Pine is much more secure.  Pine supports Kerberos and CRAM-MD5
authentication.  Pine doesn't leave a copy of all your mail on the PC
where anybody can read it.

Pine scales much better when you have many mailboxes and/or have thousands
of messages in a single mailbox.  Very few, if any, of the pretty GUI IMAP
clients work well when you have more than a few hundred messages in a
mailbox.

UNIX Pine is open source.  If you don't like a decision of the developers,
or want to fix a bug, you can do so.  [PC Pine is currently not open
source, for reasons out of the control of the Pine developers.]

UNIX Pine interoperates with other UNIX mail tools.  It will read whatever
layout of mailbox files you set up with other programs, and doesn't force
you to do something specific for it.

Just about the only thing that Pine doesn't do well (yet) is handling of
non-English character sets.  This is coming in a future version.

Bottom line:

Netscape is for people who want pretty pictures and modest needs.  Pine is
an "industrial strength" mail program for people who have "industrial
strength" mail needs.

-- Mark --

* RCW 19.190 notice: This email address is located in Washington State. *
* Unsolicited commercial email may be billed $500 per message.          *
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

You can read the rest of this comp.mail.pine discussion on “Why using pine?”— and participate in it — at groups.google.com.

And here is another message from Mark Crispin, this one posted to comp.mail.imap.

From: Mark Crispin <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU>
Newsgroups: comp.mail.imap
Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing
Message-ID: <Pine.NXT.4.33.0101261913570.10813-100000@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU>
References: <94tbu3$np8$1@slb2.atl.mindspring.net>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 19:17:00 -0800
To: Mindspring <scokelly@mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: Outlook 2000 vs Outlook Express 5 vs other IMAP clients

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Mindspring wrote:
> 1) Besides Outlook and Outlook Express, what are other IMAP clients that I
> can test against my server. I am going to check out Mulberry from cyrusoft -
> but I was wondering if there are others.  This is from Windows clients.  I
> guess I can try Netscape.  What about Pine?

Yes, you definitely want to try Pine.  Pine is one of a small handful of
clients (Mulberry is another) which thoroughly use the full suite of IMAP
functionality.  Pine will find problems in an IMAP server implementation
that the browser-based clients will glibly ignore.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

You can read the rest of this comp.mail.imap discussion on “Outlook 2000 vs Outlook Express 5 vs other IMAP clients”— and participate in it — at groups.google.com.

Philosophy

Seven Philosophical Reasons to Use Pine

To me, choosing to use Pine is more than just a software choice. By using Pine, I am choosing not to use a bloated commercial proprietary program and I am choosing to support a standards-based, plug-and-play, multi-platform program that is shipped with its source code. Pine . . .

1. uses the latest Internet messaging standards including IMAP, NNTP, ESMTP, SMTP, MIME, LDAP, Kerberos, SSH, TLS/SSL, vCards, RFC2822: Internet Message Format (RFC822's replacement), RFC2076: Common Internet Message Headers, RFC2554: SMTP authentication (AKA SMTP AUTH). Pine can also be used to access POP inboxes — for details about using Pine as a POP client, see Infinite Ink's Accessing and “Popping” POP Inboxes.
   
   
2. understands many mailbox formats, including legacy and standard plaintext formats. To find out about the benefits of plaintext, see The Joy of Plaintext by Zimran Ahmed.
   
   
3. uses the plug-and-play software model (modular architecture) so you can plug in external programs to help you access and process—edit, encrypt/decrypt, filter, and so on—your messages.
   
   
4. works on many platforms so you do not need to learn a new mailer or news reader when you use another operating system.
   
   
5. treats mail and news messages essentially the same so you can use the same user interface and commands in both realms.
   
   
6. is available gratis (free of charge).
   
   
7. is shipped with its source code so you can customize it using your own patches or the patches available on the Net. Note that starting with version 4.00, the PC-Pine source code is no longer available because it contains a built-in proprietary spell-checking program.

Free/Libre Open Source Software and Pine

News The next version of Pine will be called Alpine and will be released under a FLOSS license. Details are at the University of Washington Alpine Information Center.

Pine is free of charge (gratis) and Unix Pine is shipped with its source code but because of restrictions the University of Washington puts on what you can do with the code, it does not satisfy either Bruce Perens definition of “open-source software” or Richard Stallman's definition of “free software” (AKA “libre software”). For more about these terms, see

• the FOLDOC definitions of open source and free software
• the definitions at the Free Software Foundation
• Richard Stallman's Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”
•  my del.icio.us bookmarks related to FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software)

For more about this issue, including discussion, see:

• Peter Wayner's message about state of research that was sent to Dave Farber's Interesting-People mailing list on 21 April 2003, in which he says:

  “Today, it's truly astounding how little of the open source we have comes from within the academy given the historical devotion to open source ideals.”

  IMHO, the University of Washington is doing a lot better than most academic institutions at contributing free (gratis) software to the world and they deserve our thanks!
  
  
  
• Redhat Bugzilla Bug 63235 - Create rpms for imap-utils, which includes an interesting discussion including this excerpt:

  3) The upstream development of imap and pine are done in a closed development model. Only the core team of developers at the university have access to the code during development. They occasionally make public snapshots available, but it is more like a public beta thrown over the fence than an open model. There is no public development community surrounding these codebases.

  
  
• My first two Miscellaneous Pine Wishes below, which are related to the previous item.
  
  
• Salon.com, 4 January 2002:  Public money, private code — this article and the letters to the editor responding to it give some insight into this complicated issue
  
  
• OpenInformatics.org — includes a petition to Keep Publicly-Funded Research Public
  
  
• groups.google.com: comp.mail.pine: 2001 August 2:  Is pine free ?
  
  
• LinuxToday, 2 July 2001:  When Non-Free is Free Enough by Chris Allegretta; discussion is at the bottom of the page
  
  
• Slashdot.org, 3 July 2001:  Pine/Pico License Misconceptions — discussion inspired by Chris Allegretta's LinuxToday article
  
  
• groups.google.com:  Interesting article about pine and pico
  
  
• Rick's Rants:  What's wrong with using pine?

Philosophy Summary

If you are committed to using only free (libre) or open-source (Bruce Perens definition) software, then Pine is not an option for you and you will need to use a messaging client such as Mutt or GNUMail.app, which are each free in all senses of the word. But if you use software — such as Dreamweaver, Mulberry, SecureCRT, Powermarks, or Mac OS X — that does not satisfy these strict definitions, Pine is an option for you.

If Pine is an option for you, the seven philosophical reasons I list above are probably not enough to help you decide if Pine is the right mail and news program for you. Pine's features, some of which are listed below, are the main reasons over ten million people use Pine.

Key Features

Security and Privacy Features

As you have probably heard, email viruses and bugs can damage your computer, your friends' computers, and even your life (for example, if a private message or file is automatically mailed to everyone in your address book). To minimize your risk, practice safe computing and use a mail client, such as Pine, that

1. is regularly updated to guard against the latest exploits
2. lets you customize how it handles attachments and HTML messages
3. lets you specify the names of directories, user files and file extensions. This way you may be able to hide personal data from viruses such as the Welyah virus (AKA Shoho or I-Worm), which harvests email addresses from *.mbx files. For more about this, see Use Non-Standard Directory and File Names on my Power Pine page.
4. lets you do secure authentication and secure message access using protocols such as SSL/TLS. (This of course is useful only if you have an ISP that supports secure authentication and message access!)

Pine in its default configuration is vulnerable to executable attachments but, unlike many other mail clients, you can fix this vulnerability by using either a global or pine-specific mailcap file. In the rest of this section I discuss email vulnerabilities, how you can protect yourself from some of them, and security & privacy areas that I think Pine needs improvement.

• Privacy Foundation: FAQ: Web Bugs
  
  
• InfoWorld: Embedded HTML 'bugs' pose potential security risk
  
  
• Network World, 02 Dec 01: HTML e-mail open to 'wiretaps' By John Cox
  
  
• The New York Times: “Software to Track E-Mail Raises Privacy Concerns” by Amy Harmon is available on a single page or on multiple pages (free NYT registration required)
  
  
• The New York Times: Email's Evolution: Now It Can Report Back (free NYT registration required)
  
  
• The Register: E-mail 'bug' danger overstated?

Another problem with HTML messages is that they can contain scripts, which can be used to invade your privacy or infect your system. The following articles describe examples of this.

• The Register: JavaScript makes e-mail bugging easy
  
  
• The New York Times, 5 February 2001: “A Trick to Snoop on E-Mail” by Amy Harmon is available in a printer-friendly ad-free format or in a regular (with advertising) format (free NYT registration required). Related links and discussion about this article are at Linux Today.

The Pine internal HTML parser does not run scripts so Pine users are not vulnerable to these type of HTML bugs either. If you want to avoid HTML as much as possible, you can tell Pine to not display HTML in a message that is of MIME type “multipart/alternative” by setting the feature prefer-plain-text in your Pine configuration. If you receive an attachment that is of MIME type “text/html”, Pine will use your mailcap file (if text/html is listed in it) or your url-viewer setting to determine how to display the HTML attachment. To ensure that HTML attachments don't cause problems, set your pine-launched HTML viewer to not display images or run scripts.

In the Security section on my Power Pine page, I discuss setting up a mailcap file to avoid bugs and viruses that are spread via attachments; setting up SASL, SSL/TSL, and SSH port forwarding for IMAP authentication & connection security; and more. Even though that page focuses on PC-Pine, the discussion is relevant to Unix Pine and Pine running on other systems. My Pine Security-Enhancement Wishes section below describe some areas where I think Pine security could be improved.

Miscellaneous Features

Pine has a clean interface, all the standard features most mailers and news readers have, and you can do everything using efficient keystroke commands. In addition, with Pine you can:

• Run multiple instances at the same time so you can, for example, be viewing your personal inbox, a mailing list, your backup-all mailbox, and a news group all at the same time.
  
  
• Access and update any mailbox — in any mailbox format — that resides on an IMAP server (as long as the IMAP server can serve that type of mailbox). For example, you can access Maildir mailboxes using Pine and either a Courier or Dovecot IMAP server.
  
  
• Access and update many different mailbox formats that reside in your local file system, including the following formats:
  
  
  • traditional Unix mail spool (mbox) — this is the Unix Pine default mailbox format;  this format is also known as "Berkeley mail format," "BSD mail format," "Unix mail format," "/var/spool/mail format," "generic mail format" and "RFC-822 mailboxes." It is the format where lines beginning with “From?” (From space) are used to separate messages, and where any occurences of “From?” inside a message body is replaced with “>From?”; Also see Eduardo Chappa's The Unix Format
    
    
  • c-client MBX — this is the PC-Pine default mailbox format
  • tenex
  • MH
  • mx
  • MMDF
  • Netnews
  • phile
  • carmel
  • MTX (obsolete folder format but still accessible by Pine)
    
    
  This makes Pine very useful for processing legacy mailboxes. Details about mailbox formats are in my #4 Pine Wish below.
  
  
• access public, shared, and private folders.
  
  
• store your mailboxes on IMAP servers, store your address books on IMAP servers, & store your Pine configuration files on IMAP servers; and seamlessly access them from Pine running on a different system without worrying about your systems getting out of sync (being able to do this is one of the reasons why IMAP is great).
  
  
• open a URL in your browser by highlighting the URL and pressing Return twice or, if you have mouse support, by double clicking the URL.
  
  
• simultaneously send a message to email addresses, newsgroups, and Fcc (folder courtesy copy) it to a local or IMAP-accessible mailbox.
  
  
• automatically set your Fcc to be the recipient's name, the recipient's nickname, the current folder, the last Fcc used, any string, or to depend on the role you are using. You can also change the Fcc on the fly while you are composing a message.
  
  
• create a virtual mailbox (a group of messages presented as if they were a mailbox) using Pine's aggregate operations. This makes it easy to focus on only the messages you are currently interested in. To learn more about Pine virtual mailboxes, see Index Color Rule and Virtual Mailbox Example on the Power Pine page.
  
  
• perform aggregate operations - save, print, delete, take addresses, flag, bounce, forward, reply to, search, pipe, and more - on all messages in a folder or virtual mailbox.
  
  
• search the full text or just the Subject, From, To, or Cc header of all messages in a folder, virtual mailbox, or group of folders.
  
  
• flag messages as read (seen), answered, deleted, or important. Some are set automatically and all can be changed by hand.
  
  
• flag messages with user-defined keywords, which are discussed in Setting Up Keywords (Labels) on the Power Pine page. As far as I know, Pine is the only IMAP client that supports 22 (or more) user-defined keywords.
  
  
• sort messages by date, subject, from, to, cc, size, thread, score, size, and more.
  
  
• create start-up macros using Pine's initial keystrokes (-I) command-line argument.
  
  
• plug in your favorite editor, encryption program, spell checker, and other programs to help you create and process messages. Being able to plug and play like this is an example of Pine's modular architecture.
  
  
• filter your messages by using either an external program, such as procmail, on your IMAP server or Pine's built-in filters (available in Pine 4.20 and later) and then use Pine's incoming-folders feature to easily move through the RECENT messages in all your incoming folders.
  
  
• automatically add customized headers, including a customized From header, to your messages and change them on the fly when you are composing a message.
  
  
• pipe a message or group of messages through an external program (available in all Unix-type Pines, including Cygwin Pine and Mac Pine, and in PC-Pine 4.60 and later).
  
  
• access multiple IMAP, POP, and NNTP servers
  
  
• use roles to change your From address, Fcc mailbox, template, SMTP server, NNTP server, and many other settings. Some other programs use the term persona, personality, identity, or profile to mean what Pine means by role.
  
  
• automatically change your signature using either roles or sending filters.
  
  
• use standard Windows features like clicking, double-clicking, drop-down menus, pop-up menus, dialog boxes, scroll bars, and the Windows clipboard in PC-Pine.
  
  
• use MAPI to launch PC-Pine from MS Windows applications that are mail enabled.
  
  
• run it (Unix Pine) remotely in an ssh window so you can use it when you are visiting a friend or at an Internet Cafe.
  
  
• print to a local printer while running Pine remotely in a ssh window by setting Pine's printer variable to attached-to-ansi or attached-to-ansi-no-formfeed. Note that this does not work with all ssh clients. For example, PuTTY and the default MS-Windows telnet client, %WINDIR%\telnet.exe, do not support atttached-to-ansi printing.

Finally, because of Pine's keyboard and ASCII nature, it is one of the Internet programs that can easily be used by people with disabilities.

Sample Commands

Some of Pine's power commands do not seem intuitive but once you learn them, you will be able to process messages more quickly than you can with most other mailers and news readers. Here are examples of some Pine commands that are powerful and quick (after you learn them).

If you are not a Pine user, these commands probably look cryptic but they are actually logical and easy to memorize. For example, I remember  ; A A D  by thinking  Select All Apply Delete  (because ;=Select, A=All, A=Apply, and D=Delete). After you use Pine's power commands for a few weeks, you will be able to quickly invoke these key sequences.

Discussion Groups

The best place to discuss Pine is the Usenet group comp.mail.pine, which you can access using any of the following URLs:

• HTTP client (i.e., a web browser): <http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.mail.pine>
  
  
• NNTP client that is set up to access a Usenet server: <news:comp.mail.pine> or <nntp:comp.mail.pine>. For example, if you launch Pine with this command:

  pine -url news:comp.mail.pine

  and if your Pine nntp-server is set to a Usenet server, Pine will open the comp.mail.pine group.
  
  
• NNTP client: <news://my.usenet.server/comp.mail.pine> or <nntp://my.usenet.server/comp.mail.pine>. For example, if you launch Pine with this command:

  pine -url news://my.usenet.server/comp.mail.pine

  and if you replace my.usenet.server with the name of your Usenet server, Pine will open the comp.mail.pine group.
  
  

Before you post a question to a discussion group:

• read the FAQs
• read related web pages
• search the discussion group archives
• search the Web
• read a group for a while to get a sense of what is acceptable (and what you might get flamed for!)

If you are able to answer someone's question, please post your answer to the group so that others — both now and in the future — can benefit from your answer. Answering publicly will also let others know that the question has been answered so they do not spend time answering it themselves. If you post a question to a group, do not ask people to mail the answer only to you. I, and many others, never answer these types of posts because they show that the person who posted the