ii.com · All About PINE: POP, IMAP, NNTP, & ESMPT Client for Unix, MS Windows, and Mac OS X by Nancy McGough

On This Page

History of the Pine Program and Its Name
Why Use Pine
Discussion Groups
- Flames
LINKS
Wishes
Pine Promotion
- Why Promote Pine
- News and Email Software Lists
- Service Provider Support Pages
- Interoperability
- Polls, Votes, Ratings, and Discussions
- Tell People About Pine and Pico in . . .
More Ads
Thanks
- How You Can Show Your Appreciation for Pine

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.

Note

Pine is actually a package of programs and is sometimes called “The Pine Message System.” The Unix Pine Message System is made up of the core program, Pine; the pine composer, Pico; and the pine lister of things, Pilot. The PC-Pine Message System is made up of Pine, Pico, some DLLs, and uses the MS-Windows file manager for file management.

Starting with Pine 4.40, the Pine message system includes the remote-pinerc command-line tools rpload and rpdump.

Starting with Pine 4.50, the Pine message system includes mailutil, a command-line tool that helps manage remote and local mailboxes.

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.

release date	pine version	known pine vulnerability?	pico version	known pico vulnerability?	IMAP Toolkit version & comments
2007 ? (α testing in progress)	Alpine (Pine 5.0)		5.0?		imap-2006x? introduction of mix mailbox format release of Tcl-based WebAlpine (formerly known as WebPine and available only at UW) `-kwcopy` (IMAP keyword copy) command-line argument added to mailutil PC-Alpine is open source (PC-Pine 4.64- is closed source) released under an Apache License; to learn about Pine/Alpine licensing, see Free/Libre Open Source Software and Pine below Alpine supports UTF-8, 256 colors, LDAP authentication, Apple Keychain, & more
2005 Sep 28	4.64		4.10		imap-2004g
2005 Apr 28	4.63	yes	4.10		imap-2004e
2005 Jan 18	4.62	yes	4.9		imap-2004c
2004 July 15	4.61	yes	4.8		imap-2004a
2004 May 10	4.60	yes	4.7		imap-2004
2003 Sep 10	4.58	yes (fixed this but not this)	4.6	no
2003 May 29	4.56	yes (fixed this but not this)	4.6	no
2003 April 16	4.55	yes (fixed this but not this)	4.5	no
2003 Jan 15	4.53	yes	4.4	no
2003 Jan 9	4.52	yes	4.4	no
2002 Dec 13	4.51	yes	4.4	no
2002 Nov 20	4.50	yes (fixed this but not this)	4.3	no	imap 2002? 1st release of mailutil (replaces chkmail, imapcopy, imapmove, imapxfer, mbxcopy, mbxcreat, & mbxcvt)
2002 Jan 9	4.44	yes	4.2	no
2001 Nov 28	4.43	yes	4.2	no
2001 Nov 21	4.42	yes	4.2	no
2001 Nov 16	4.41	yes	4.2	no
2001 Sep 14	4.40	yes	4.1	no
2001 Feb 1	4.33	yes	4.0	no
2001 Jan 17	4.32	yes	4.0	no
2000 Dec 5	4.31	yes	3.9	yes
2000 Oct 26	4.30	yes	3.8	yes
1999 Nov 17	4.21	yes	3.7	yes

all (1990-now)	see Pine Release Chronology & Version Changes

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.

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.
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???)
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.
(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.
Route your incoming mail messages through this Procmail recipe, which renames the Newsgroups header if it exists in an incoming mail message.
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.
(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:

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 . . .

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.
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.
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.
works on many platforms so you do not need to learn a new mailer or news reader when you use another operating system.
treats mail and news messages essentially the same so you can use the same user interface and commands in both realms.
is available gratis (free of charge).
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

is regularly updated to guard against the latest exploits
lets you customize how it handles attachments and HTML messages
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.
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.

Starting with Pine 4.0, Pine can do basic rendering of a message body (or body part) that is in HTML format. Because Pine can not display images, Pine users are not vulnerable to the "bugged" HTML messages that are described in these articles:

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).

Command	What it does
`* *`	flag the current message as important
`; A A D`	delete all messages in the current mailbox or newsgroup
`; A A S` foldername	save all messages in the current mailbox or newsgroup to foldername
`; T A` string `Z`	display a virtual mailbox of all messages in the current folder or newsgroup that contain string in the body or header of the message
`; S * Z`	display a virtual mailbox of all message that are flagged important
`; S N Z`	display a virtual mailbox of all message that are unread
`; S ! A Z`	display a virtual mailbox of all message that are unanswered
`$ O`	sort all messages in the current mailbox or newsgroup by Ordered subject (simulates threading)
`$ H`	sort all messages in the current mailbox or newsgroup by tHread (available in 4.30 and later)
`$ Z $ R`	sort all messages in the current mailbox or newsgroup by reverse size; you can use this to help you visually scan a “catchall” mailbox and see if any non-spam snuck past your reverse spam filters
`^W + CR ^W ^X Z` (*note* `CR` = carriage return)	display a virtual mailbox of all messages in the current mailbox or newsgroup that contain your email address, or one of your `alt-addresses`, in the To header

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.

	*Note*
	In order to use Pine's power commands you need to edit your Pine configuration so that these features are turned on. Details about this are at Useful Settings for Power Users on Infinite Ink's Power Pine page. For example, the command sequences above that start with `;` or `^W` will work only if the feature enable-aggregate-command-set is set.

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 question does not want the group to benefit from discussion of the question. If you have flaky access to Usenet, you can ask people to both post and mail responses.

Flames

A sport in Internet discussion groups is flaming and Pine users seem to be a popular target of this sport. Here is an example that made it into alt.humor.best-of-usenet:

Subject: [alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners] Re: Pine, Kill files & deletes

If you don't like flames, you can use Pine filters, which are available in Pine 4.20 and later, to "kill" flamers so you won't see messages from them. To set up a filter, either type MSRRF (Main > Setup > Rules > Roles > Filters) or when you are viewing a message from a flamer type TF (TakeTo > Filters). If someone is especially obnoxious, I set the filter folder type to "Any" so both the flamer's news and email messages are automatically deleted. To me this is a very satisfying response. And a side benefit is that flamers are quite annoyed by being ignored.

Another way to deal with a flame, especially one directed at you, is to have a Zen attitude and just let it roll over you, smiling silently to yourself about the paradoxical nature of the universe.

For more about Pine flames, see Sven Guckes' Flaming - Internet Xtreme Sports - NancyBoys!, which is archived at The Wayback Machine here, and at a number of other URLs listed here.

LINKS

@ (UW), the creator & maintainer of Pine
- UW Pine Information Center (PIC)
- UW Alpine Information Center
- IMAP Information Center (IIC)
- The Pine FAQ
- man pages of pine, pico, pilot, mailutil, rpload, and rpdump
- command-line arguments for pine, pico, and pilot — these are close to (but not exactly the same as) what is displayed when you run pine -h, pico -h, and pilot -h on your system
- Downloading Pine
- UW IMAP Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- UW IMAP Server Source Distribution Documentation, especially IMAP Toolkit Frequently Asked Questions
- Documents Aimed at UW Users — these contain useful info for all Pine users
  - Pine and Email Frequently Asked Questions at the UW
  - Getting Started With Email Using Pine (A basic introdution to Pine? for UW users)
  - Pine Newsreader FAQs
  - Configuring Pine to Read Newsgroups at the UW
  - Configuring Desktop Email Clients to Use LDAP (includes instructions for using Pine with LDAP)
  - Addressing Email Messages with Pine (in Windows on Computing newsletter)
  - Something for Everyone in Pine 4.10 (in Windows on Computing newsletter)
  - Downloading PC-Pine customized for UW Users
  - WebPine; also see the messages Re: Horde / Imp in MoonGroup.com's MailHelp mailing list and Re: IMAP in disconnected mode in comp.mail.imap, each of which discusses WebPine.
@ Infinite Ink (ii.com), the creator & maintainer of this page
- Power Pine: Getting the Most Out of Unix-, Mac- & PC-Pine — Includes many Pine tips and tricks such as securing Pine, how to set up IMAP-accessible address books and folders, and my favorite feature-list settings. Also includes step-by-step instructions for downloading, setting up, and customizing Pine on MS Windows. Many of the steps are relevant to setting up Pine on any platform.
- Changing Your From Header in Pine -- includes information about setting up and using roles
- Setting Up Pine for Multiple IMAP Accounts (part of ii.com's IMAP Service Providers page)
- Compartmentalizing and Sharing Your Pine Configuration — includes Pine settings that you can copy and plug in to your Pine
- Pine's Feature List and its More than 90 Features
- Starting Pine with Command-Line Arguments
- Outline of a Book About Pine
- IMAP Service Providers: A Step in Dealing with Viruses, Spam, and Email Overload -- includes a growing list of free & reasonably-priced IMAP service providers, instructions for setting up Pine to access many of these ISPs, and lots of IMAP tools, tips, & links
- Reverse Spam Filtering: Winning Without Fighting — describes the strategy that I use to deal with spam
- Procmail Quick Start: An Introduction to Email Filtering with a Focus on Procmail
- Mail, News, and General Messaging has links to general information about mail and news, including information about delivery filtering (using procmail and other programs) which is one of the most frequently asked questions in the Pine discussion groups.
  
  Pine-Related Tips Posted to Discussion Groups by Nancy McGough of Infinite Ink
  - Windows-1252 charset hack
  - About the Sender, X-Sender, and X-X-Sender Headers in RE: 'sender'-checks by mailservers
  - How to specify a mailbox format, such as traditional Unix mail spool, MH, or c-client MBX format by using the #driver.unix, #driver.mh, and #driver.mbx tokens, in Re: PC/PINE will not open my mailbox, help! and in my Pine Wish #4 below
  - How to cancel a News Message in Pine
  - I discuss doing (or getting around) POP-before-SMTP or IMAP-before-SMTP authentication with Pine here and here
  - comp.mail.pine messages posted by McGough
  - comp.mail.imap messages posted by McGough
  - comp.mail.misc messages posted by McGough
Miscellaneous Pine Docs and Tips
- My del.icio.us bookmarks about Messaging/Clients/Pine and Messaging/IMAP
- Gopi Sundaram's periodic informational posting “[comp.mail.pine] Welcome! Read this first” is available at faqs.org (hypertext), in Gopi's site (plain text), and possibly on your news server in comp.mail.pine.
- Gopi Sundaram's FAQ for comp.mail.pine
- Eduardo Chappa's Help for Pine, which includes a Pine Tip of the Day page
- Paul Heinlein's Pine+OpenSSL HOWTO includes a section about Certificates in PC-Pine
- Nick Burch's
  - Configuring pine to use TLS / SSL
  - Making pine do SMIME
  - Certificate Management and Installation with OpenSSL
  - Certificate Installation with OpenSSL - Other People's Certificates
- SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center): Pine: A UNIX email client supporting IMAP and SSL
- UW Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering: Secure IMAP access to CSE Exchange via PINE
- University of Cambridge Computing Service: Getting Started With Pine and Further Features of Pine
- Oxford University Computing Services: PC-Pine for Windows Email Configuration
- Messiah College: E-Mail with PC-Pine: Beginner's Guide
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Pine & Pico Introduction, Pine/Pico: Advanced, and a list of all Email-related docs
- Carnegie Mellon University: Getting Started with Pine
- University of New Mexico: Get Started with Pine and Advanced Pine Commands
- University of Illinois at Chicago: Pine Email and News Reader for UNIX (describes v. 4.10)
- Stanford University: Pine FAQ and How to control your mail spool with Pine
- University of Pittsburgh CSSD: Configuring Pine to Read E-mail from the IMAP E-Mail Service
- University of Tennessee Department of Computer Science: Using Pine with Imap
- Columbia University: Pine - A CUNIX Email Client, Reading Netnews, and Using Pine to Bounce Multiple Messages
- Aaron Hawley's Pine Page and his unofficial expanded version of the UW's official Pine FAQ
- Sven Guckes' Pine page
- Freshmeat Pine page - includes an ongoing discussion about Pine that anyone can join
- Courier-IMAP README -- describes setting up Pine to access personal and shared maildir-formatted folders on a Courier-IMAP server
- Alexandru Roman's Pine-Exchange mini-HOWTO -- “This HOWTO documents the configuration of the Pine email client to be used with a Microsoft Exchange Server.”
- Paul Bartlett's Pine, Mail Filtering, Etc.
- Uwe Lauth's Setting up Mail and News and Using pine offline
- The Blinux Frequently Asked Questions (Blinux-FAQ): Q: Force cursor in Pine?
- Daniel Brown's Setting Up Pine to read Sylpheed's MH folders
- pine-info message Re: File locking on FAT filesysem — useful if you are using Linux Pine to access mailboxes on a mounted FAT filesystem
- Gerald Carter's LDAP System Administration -- sample chapter 7, Email and LDAP, includes a section on Pine 4
Pico, the Pine Composer
- University of Arizona CCIT: Pico Editor Commands
- University of Pittsburgh CSSD: Using the Pico Text Editor in the Unix Environment
Conversions (Pine, Mulberry, Mozilla, Netscape, and many other mail clients can use traditional Unix mbox format mailboxes so conversion programs that were designed for other clients - e.g. Netscape/Mozilla - can often be used for Pine; also see Syncing and Snarfing Mailboxes below)
- mailutil, which is shipped with Pine 4.50+, can be used to move a mailbox between two IMAP servers or between an IMAP Server and a local system and in the process convert the mailbox to the appropriate format for the target system.
- eMailman Conversion page
- Weird Kid Software (WKS) emailchemy
- Connected Software: Address Magic
- joshie.com: Dawn, the Address Converter and Manager
- Using other Mailbox Files with KMail -- contains information about converting to Unix spool (mbox) format, which is one of the formats that Unix Pine and PC-Pine understand
- Donald A. Watrous's Converting emacs RMAIL to mbox format
- Yale University ITS: Pine to IMP Address Book Conversion
- Pine to IMP - imports Pine's address book into IMP
- Mike Hughes's pilot2pine - converts Pilot address books to Pine address book format
- Roger Hill's General Info on Converting to (and from) Eudora Format
- Eric Maryniak's Eudora2Unix is a collection of Python scripts that convert Eudora mailbox files to mbox format. It has a page at both sourceforge.net and freshmeat.net
- Jonathan J. Miner's eud2mbox is at freshmeat.net and jjminer.org
- mbx2mbox
- Jürgen Haible's MsgCvt
- Ivan Vecanski's Ruby eml to mbox converter for fastmail.fm archives
- qmail.org's mbox2maildir perl script
- qmail.org's maildir2mbox man page and c code
- Robin Whittle's page about mb2md and mb2md-2 - Converting Mbox mailbox files to Maildir format
  - Juri Haberland's enhanced mb2md - recommended by Robin Whittle
- mutt-users mailing list: "Perfect" mbox to Maildir converter
- Greg Lindahl's MS Outlook to Unix Mailbox Conversion mini HOWTO
- Dave Smith's Outlook to unix mail converter (ol2mbox) and LibDBX
- Matt Pulver's pinebk2muttbk at Quantumlab.net and Freshmeat
- Ken Simler's Converting Eudora Mailboxes and Address Books
- Joseph Davidson's (AKA InterGuru): Email Address Book Conversions and Maibox Conversion, Other Utilities, and Links to Other Useful Sites
- Ahmed El-Mahmoudy's NStoPine at the primary URL or the backup URL - converts Netscape .ldif format to Pine address book format
- Andrew Triumpf's Convert Pine, Elm address books to Netscape (.ldif) format
- Lakshman's pineToKMail will convert an addressbook in pine format to a KMail addressbook
- Writing a Pine addressbook from BBDB, by Matt McClure
- comp.mail.pine message: Convert bbdb address book to Pine address book
- Mailbag Assistant — MBA is primarily a tool for managing and searching mailboxes, but since it understands many mailbox formats, you can use it to convert a mailbox from one format to another
- IncrediConvert -- converts IncrediMail messages to EML files (then you can use another conversion program to convert the EML files to a format that Pine can access)
Not in English
- Pine Vietnamese HOWTO by Long Pham Kim
- Centro de Informacion Pine en Español (Spanish)
- Einf?hrung in Pine (German)
- PINE 4 - Kurzreferenz (German)
- Universität Karlsruhe: Pine (German)
- Universität Karlsruhe: Pc-Pine installieren (German) -- this seems to be based on an old version of my Setting Up PC-Pine for Pine Users
- Pusat Informasi Pine (Indonesian)
- Bj?rn Tore Knudsen's Tips til konfigurering av Pine (Norwegian)
Building, Installing, Porting, & Patching pine, pico, pilot, imapd, rpload, rpdump, & mailutil
- Official Instructions from the University of Washington
- Pine Legal Notices — discusses adding L (for Local) to the version number when you modify the source (this is one of the reasons Pine is not considered “free software”)
- List of UW ports -- includes the three-letter codes you need to use as an argument to the build command
- Building Pine so users have the option to store passwords in a PASSFILE
- Eduardo Chappa's guide to building Pine
- Satya's review of Pine at FreeOS.com or at Satya's personal site -- includes instructions for compiling and installing Pine
- Nick Burch's Installing CA Certificates into the OpenSSL framework includes where OpenSSL thinks its certificates/keys/etc are stored in RedHat, Suse, Debian, Mac OS X, and a Normal OpenSSL Tarball Build
- Building Pine with the latest IMAP and c-client libraries
  
  Mac OS X (pronounced “Mac Oh Es Ten”)
  - The UW provides a pre-built pine binary (pine-bin.osx-10.4.Z) for Mac OS X Tiger. On 2005-Nov-28, I posted a message to comp.mail.pine that includes step-by-step instructions for installing pine-bin.osx-10.4.Z on Mac OS X Tiger.
  - Nancy McGough's Building and Installing Alpine (Apache-Licensed Pine)
  - Josh Larios' MacOS X Stuff, which includes Open SSL certificates and MacPine - Pine for MacOS X 10.3. (You may also be interested in the now obsolete Pine 4.50 for OS X 10.2 with LDAP, Kerberos and SSL support, which is bundled in a standard OS X installer package. This page includes information about how Josh compiled Pine. You can also read his How I built Pine 4.44 for MacOS X version 10.1.5 and his original notes.)
  - Paul Heinlein's Pine on Mac OS X -- notes on building and running pine or alpine under Mac OS X
  - Ernie Rothman's pine-4.56 with ssl support -- according to Emily Jackson, this is “the easiest instructions I've ever seen for building Pine (with SSL) on Mac OS X (just used it to build 4.58 instead of waiting for it to be added to fink).”
  - comp.mail.pine: rhoge's message Re: Compiling Pine 4.44 with Jaguar and Jeffrey Goldberg's followup message about how to populate /usr/local/certs on Jaguar
  - For Pine-related Fink pages, see the results of searching Fink for pine; note that Jeffrey Whitaker's pine-ssl is in the crypto section of “current-unstable”
  - sympatico.ca: Setting up pine for Mac OS X
  - downwardspiral.net: Compiling pine in Mac OS X
  - Michael Reynold's Pine 4.40 for MacOS X with SSL and LDAP support
  - macosx.forked.net
  - Chris Roberts port and instructions at The GNU MAC OS X Public Archive
  - Kapu.NET
  - Cerebus the Pope (Jerry Stratton): Compiling Pine (modified from kapu.net) and Unix Tips for Mac OS X
  - Stepwise.com's Softrak -- go to Browse Software by Category > Mac OS X > Internet > Email Clients
  - OSXFAQ
  - GNU-Darwin port
  - To build your own Pine for OS X with SSL support, you need to first install the OpenSSL header files. (OS X 10.1.5 and earlier include the OpenSSL library, but without the header files.) Instructions for doing this are at each of the pages in the first two bullets.
    - Scott Anguish's Building OpenSSH 3.1 on Mac OS X 10.1.x in the section“One more library - openssl”
    - Dave Ely's Setting Up Stunnel Under MacOS X in the section “Build Steps”
    - Instructions for installing OpenSSL in its entirety are at Graham Orndorff's Step 2: Install OpenSSL 3.1
  - After you install the Pine package on Mac OS X, check out the following for some tips:
    - comp.mail.pine: Setting Mac pine URL viewer? (Was: Re: mac pine)
    - comp.mail.pine: image viewer in Mac OS X
    - comp.mail.pine: David Sewell's Re: Another Image Viewer/OS X Question and this entire thread
    - macosxhints.com: Use a GUI editor with the UNIX Pine mail program by WCityMike (Mike Harris)
    - macosxhints.com: A few scripts to help with Pine integration -- this hint points to the “PINE Tricks for Mac OS X” folder at homepage.mac.com/dcox/, but unfortunately this link no longer works -- if you know where these files have moved, please let me know.
    - search macosxhints.com for “pine”
    - Oreilly.net: "pico -w" for editing config files
  - Here are some Pine-releated things you might want to do on your Mac. If you install an IMAP dæmon, make sure that none of your Mac username/password pairs are ever sent over the Internet to your Mac in cleartext.
Debian/GNU Linux
- packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/alpine
- Jaldhar H. Vyas's unofficial .debs for pine and for uw-imap-ssl. Note that according to a message in comp.mail.pine Jaldhar's Pine 4.53 for Debian GNU/Linux Woody has problems and it's best if you compile your own Pine.
- Santiago Vila Doncel's Official Unofficial .debs
- Tzafrir Cohen's message Re: Problems compiling Pine in comp.mail.pine
- Linuxnewbie.org: Pine & Pico Installation (for the very old pine 3.96)
- Debian FAQ #4.10: Where is pine?
- Building your own Pine for Debian/GNU Linux
- Debian Linux IMAP packages
Unix on Windows (Cygwin, U/WIN, etc.)
- Eduardo Chappa's Cygwin ports of pine, pico, pilot, mtest, imapd, ipop2d, ipop3d, rpload, & rpdump; and the imap utilities mailutil, dmail, mlock, and tmail
- Baochun Li's Cygwin port of Pine 4.30
- Cygwin port of IMAP-2000 by Jim Grishaw or Adrian Hall
- Cygwin port of Pine 4.10
- AT&T U/WIN port of Pine 4.10
- dmoz.org: Unix on Windows packages — some of these are prepackaged with Pine
Other Ports
- Nicholas Paul Sheppard's Pine 4.50 for OS/2
- Jeff Shepherd's Pine/IMAP Programs for Amiga
- RedHat port of 4.50 by Mike Harris
  - Bugzilla discussion about RH 7.0 and “IMAP no longer uses ~/mbox”
- FreeBSD ports - includes Japanese, Korean, Russian, & Chinese language versions of Pine. You may have to hack some URLs on the FreeBSD page because they are not all exactly right.
- Lopaka Delp's Installing pine-4.30 with SSL on FreeBSD- 4.1.1
- UW's List of Non-UW Pine adaptations and resources
- The IMAP Connection's list of Pine ports — you need to scroll down to the Pine ports, which are, as of 27 March 2004, numbers 44 through 50.
Pine Patches — before you patch Pine, read the Pine Legal Notices, which discuss adding L (for Local) to the version number when you modify the source (this is one of the reasons Pine is not considered “free software”)
- Eduardo Chappa's
- Nicolas Christin's Pine patches
- Rafael Martinez Torres's patch to enable PINE-4.58 run on both IPv6|IPv4 protocols
- enZo's Pine 4.53 (and 4.50) Privacy Patch -- same functionality as Roger Marquis's Pine 4.44 Privacy Patch (next item), with a couple additional things. (Not needed in Pine 4.51 and later.)
- Roger Marquis's Privacy Patch for Pine 4.44 and Pine 4.50 will cause {X-}Sender: headers to be omitted.
- Torsten Rohlfing's patch so Pine will suggest the last directory used when you attach or save an attachment. This patch is discussed in the comp.mail.pine message with subject Memory for pine's file browser. (Not needed in Pine 4.51+.)
- Bernhard Kaindl's PINE UTF-8 FAQ -- includes links to the Pine UTF-8 patch (Not needed in Alpine.)
- Jungshik Shin's Unicode patch is discussed in comp.mail.pine in Re: pine and utf-8 again.
- Patches so Pine can access local maildir-formatted mailboxes are here, here, here, here, here, here, and in this section of the qmail home page. According to someone who knows about these things: “I know for a fact that the Pine maildir patches are completely bogus.” Important: The most robust way to access maildir-formatted mailboxes is to use IMAP, rather than local file calls, and an IMAP server -- such as Courier, Dovecot, or BincIMAP -- that can create and serve maildir-formatted mailboxes — this requires no patching of Pine.
- 1 billion unix time patch for use with this pine maildir patch — does anyone know if this works with any of the other Pine maildir patches?
- Dave Holland's Pine Patches
- Timothy J. Luoma's Patches (no-sender and more)
- Peter Karlsson's Unofficial Pine Patches
- Pine 4.21, 4.20, and 4.10 patches (pico, external spellchecker invocation, and 8-bit text in subject)
- Nick Sayer's SSL patches - you need OpenSSL
- Jauder Ho's patch to make pine 3.96 socksified
- Steven's PC-Pine patch to get rid of the X-X-Sender header is discussed in this thread. Before you use this patch, read the warning in my followup message. Note that “Steven” posted his message via a free NNTP server, his email address is at a free IMAP Service Provider, and his web page is at a free web host. If you are brave enough to use this patch, please tell me what happens!

PGP and GnuPG

PGP+PINE HOWTO by Res
Matt Pulver's Pine Privacy Guard at Quantumlab.net and Freshmeat
LinuxSecurity.com, 12 April 2001: “Using GnuPG with Pine for Secure E-Mail” by Ryan W. Maple is available on a printer-friendly single page or on multiple pages. Related links and discussion are at Linux Today.
Linux Gazette, October 2000: Cryptography, PGP and Pine By Matteo Dell'Omodarme
pinepgp by Peter Soos, Peter Hanecak, and Martin Edas Edlman
pgpenvelope and documentation for configuring it with Pine
Holger Lamm's pgp4pine. It is compatible with PGP2.6.3i, PGP 5.x/6.x, and GnuPG 0.92.
Marcin Marszalek's PGP4Pine. Program knows PGP versions 2.6.3, 5.0, 6.5.1 and GNUPG 1.0. It has support for aliases file and for signature rotating programs. RPMs are also avaliable (with some latency).
Peter Daum's PAPP (Pine And PgP), AKA PGP4Pine
Mark Looi's PGP to sign and encrypt from within pine
Roland Rosenfeld's Using PGP with Pine 3.92 and newer
About.com's How to Use PGP with any Windows Email Client

Using Pine in a SSH (Secure Shell) Window

I am in search of a Mac OS X SSH client that is comparable to SecureCRT (see next item). Many people seem happy with the Mac OS X built-in command-line ssh client, but I'm not. The best bets seem to be the ones listed at dmoz.org: Computers: Security: Products and Tools: Cryptography: SSH: Clients: Macintosh, but none of these come near to VanDyke's SecureCRT (see next item).
My favorite ssh client is SecureCRT from VanDyke Software. One of the reasons I like this program so much is that it, along with its little brother CRT, lets you launch a URL in a browser on your local machine by right clicking anywhere on a URL and choosing “Open URL”. You can also select any text and choose “Open Selection as URL”.
Rasmussen Software's Using Anzio With Pine - this page contains information that is relevant to other ssh clients, e.g., how to use Pine's enable-mouse-in-xterm feature and the Unix DISPLAY environment variable with Pine running in a ssh window.
TeraTerm Pro is a free open-source telnet client that can be used with the SSH (secure shell) extension, TTSSH (supports ssh1 only), or the SSL (secure sockets layer) extension, TTX SSL. It supports X-Windows-style mouse behavior and you can set it up to launch a URL in a browser on your local machine (after you follow this procedure, you need to exit TeraTerm and then restart it for the settings to be in place).
PuTTY: A Free Win32 Telnet/SSH Client -- PuTTY does not support attached-to-ansi printing and the released version does not support ssh port forwarding (the unreleased version does). Question: Does PuTTY let you easily open a URL in a browser that's running on your local machine? Answer: No (thanks to Hans Fredrik Nordhaug for the answer to this question).
dmoz.org: Computers: Security: Products and Tools: Cryptography: SSH: Clients
dmoz.org: Computers: Programming: Languages: Java: Applications: Network: Shell and Terminal Access

Searching Through Mailboxes -- for a discussion of mailbox formats, IMAP servers, and search efficiency see the comp.mail.imap message Re: Q: Fast searching Imap server

Pine has built-in search commands that can search either a specific header or the full text of messages in one or multiple mailboxes. Details are at the UW in Can I search all my folders for a particular message using Pine? and in the comp.mail.pine threads complex mail folder searches and Search?
Horde/IMP (H3) 4.0+ is web-based IMAP client that can search through multiple mailboxes and present the search results as a single “virtual mailbox.” Horde/IMP is my current ( 27-Sep-2007) preferred way to search my gigabytes of stored IMAP messages. AFAICT, it is entirely compatible with Pine, even when Pine and Horde/IMP are operating on the same mailbox. If you are looking for a provider that offers the Horde/IMP web-based IMAP client, see my IMAP Service Providers page — if you want to use virtual mailboxes and saved searches, make sure you choose a provider that is using IMP 4.0 or later.
Mulberry runs on Linux, Solaris, MS Windows, & Mac OS and has a powerful search engine for simultaneously searching both local and IMAP-accessible mailboxes. As I discuss above, this is one of the ways that I use Mulberry as a complement to Pine.
David Coppit's grepmail is a perl program that searches normal and compressed mbox-formatted mailboxes. Cristin Pietsch's grepine is a wrapper for grepmail.
Daniel Spiljar's mboxgrep
Richard Curnow's mairix is a program for indexing and searching messages stored in Maildir- and MH-formatted folders. It's available at FreshMeat.net and at rc0.org.uk. (Does anyone know if mairix can be used when messages are stored in Maildir-format and accessed by Pine via Courier IMAP? E.g., is there a Pine plug-in or patch that can take advantage of the mairix index???)
Mailbag Assistant — MS Windows program to search, organize, archive, and if you like, HTMLize, mailboxes. Mailbag Assistant 3.0 and later support traditional Unix mail spool format mailboxes (called “Generic mail files” in MBA). MBA was nominated for a 2002 Shareware Industry Award.
groups.google.com Advanced Search is fabulous at searching archives of Usenet messages back to 1981. Since most Usenet servers automatically expire (delete) messages that are older than X, where X is a lot less than 24 years, it is not likely that you'll be able to search your Usenet server for messages dating back to 1981!
NexTrieve Ultralite
dmoz.org: Computers: Software: Information Retrieval: Fulltext
dmoz.org: Computers: Software: Internet: Authoring: Converters

Syncing and Snarfing Mailboxes
(CAUTION: You may have problems if both Pine and another program access a mailbox at the same time.)

mailutil, which is shipped with Pine 4.50 and later, can be used to copy or move a mailbox between two IMAP servers or between an IMAP Server and a local system.
The section Moving a Mailbox on my Power Pine page describes how to move mailboxes using Pine filters, Pine aggregate commands, Pine's pruned-folders and incoming-archive-folders variables, (S)FTP, and more
Tim Culver's Mailsync -- built upon the UW c-client libraries (as is the Pine package); ignores messages that don't have a Message-ID
Rimon Barr's rImap -- Remote Imap, Mail replicator; does not support SSL IMAP connections
Michael Elkins' isync is at freshmeat.net and at sourceforge.net -- commandline application which synchronizes a local maildir-style mailbox with a remote IMAP4 mailbox
Harald Welte's asis - Asynchronous Streaming IMAP Synchronizer -- Synchronizes remote IMAP mailboxes to local maildir-style mailboxes. Uses tagged commands to work fast on high-latency links. Replicates state-changes like message-read, message-flagged, ... to the server
Kirill Miazine's fm-sync.pl, which is here or here, is a perl script that fetches all FastMail.FM new messages that do not exist locally and deletes all local messages that don't exist on the server; discussed at EmailDiscussions.com in the threads Email backup and Kirill, where is fm-sync.pl script?
Juanjo Álvarez's Animail -- A POP3, IMAP4, and SSL mail retrieval utility with powerful anti-spam features
Charles Cazabon's getmail — gets mail via POP3 and saves it in either Maildir or traditional mbox format. A discussion about getmail vs fetchmail is here. Note that getmail cannot access any non-primary mailbox in your message store because it does not speak IMAP
Eric S. Raymond's fetchmail — fetchmail corrupts the envelope sender address so many people recommend that you use another tool. This problem is discussed in the Quality issues section of Responsibilities and envelopes. Other problems with fetchmail are discussed in the comp.mail.misc message Re: Marking messages unread with imap [linux].
7th Wave Software's Pullmail -- command-line utility for Windows NT and Windows 95 to collect email from a POP account and forward it to a SMTP mail system; available gratis
LinuxWorld.com: rsync & the unsung command line by Nicholas Petreley
Using Pine with slrnpull
gotmail — perl script to fetch mail out of a hotmail account
YahooPOPs! is an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 access to your Yahoo! Mail account. YahooPOPs! is available on the Windows and Unix platforms.
RaviR's FetchYahoo is a Perl script that downloads mail from a Yahoo! account to a local mail spool; this page includes a list of other fetch/popper-type programs
Vadim Zeitlin's yahoo2mbox retrieves messages from Yahoo! Groups archive and stores them in a local file in mbox format.
Tim Charron's GETMAIL for Windows
David A. Rogers Radiks — a mail transfer program for win32 that reads mail from a pop3 server and transfers it to your local hard drive. Locally the mail is stored in standard unix mailbox format.
Ulf Erikson's Poppet -- a small win32 program, very similar in design and use to Radiks
You may be able to use your web browser to “pop” messages from a POP server. Opera's built-in email client uses mailboxes (named *.MBS) that are in traditional Unix spool format and can be accessed by Pine. Netscape/AOL's Communicator, Navigator, and the Mozilla mail/news client also use Unix spool format. Please let me know what experiences you have using your web browser as a “popper” for Pine. CAUTION: You may have problems if both your web browser and Pine are accessing a mailbox at the same time.
Mulberry, which I discuss in an earlier section, can be set up to use traditional Unix spool format and it can be set up for disconnected operation with an IMAP server, which will keep a local and remote copy of a mailbox synchronized. It can also snarf messages from a POP-accessible inbox.

More Companion Programs

rss2email -- GPL'd Python script
nntp//rss -- Java-based tool that enables you to read your RSS syndicated content within an NNTP newsreader
The Prayer Webmail System -- can import/export local and remote pine .addressbook format files
HOWTO: POPFile with Pine by stainedglass (Joshua Yockey)
Using Aspell with Pine
Ulf Erikson's Useful programs -- list of programs that can be useful in cooperation with Mutt; most can be used with either Unix or PC Pine
Pine-Tools -- a group of utilities and a program called contact, designed to allow Pine users to store extended contact information in the Pine addressbook. Filters to export and import Pine addressbooks in various formats are also included.
Procmail
Spam Assassin (SA)
vim and gvim (GUI vim) -- amazing text editor that runs on Unix, MS Windows, and other platforms
pine.vim -- syntax highlighting when you edit your pinerc with vim (bundled with vim)
David Pascoe's _vimrc settings -- used when vim is used as your PC-Pine alternate editor; to see the Pine-related settings, search Dave's _vimrc file for ae (which is what PC-Pine names the beginning of its alternate editor files)
Cream for Vim -- Cream adds a long list of features to Vim, all available from familiar keyboard shortcuts and pull-down menus.
Vipul's Razor and Razor reporting with Pine
NoteTab -- MS Windows award-winning text editor that does encryption/decryption, ROT13, CRC32, MD5, and UUEncode/UUDecode operations, formatting and quoting/unquoting of email text and text fragments, and lots more (you can use NoteTab to get around the fact that PC-Pine can't do piping)
File-Ex -- MS Windows award-winning tool to enlarge and enhance the File Open and File Save dialogs; great PC-Pine companion for saving and attaching attachments
Stuart Whitmore's Web-based ROT13/ROT47 Encoder/Decoder
ClipCache Text Cleanup Demo -- web-based tool for cleaning up text of an email message
randomsig
muttprint - can be used with pine
Tim Charron's BLAT for Windows
Jarek Gawor and Gregor von Laszewski's LDAP Browser/Editor
Bruce Guenter's nullmailer -- simple relay-only mail transfer agent; can queue messages when the smarthost is down and then send them when it's up again
Pete Maclean's MIMS -- “standalone IMAP Server for Windows (95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP). MIMS is completely free software that you are welcome to use in any way you find useful.”
Thomas G. Liesner's Hamster "Classic" -- Win32 local news- and mail-server
David Harris's Mercury Mail Transport System is a comprehensive mail server for Windows and NetWare networks that includes an IMAP server, a powerful content control management system for handling unwanted mail, support for external tasks such as virus scanning and archiving, fully-programmable automatic reply logic and much more
mailutilities.com: Autoroute SMTP
David J. Kernen's Mail::IMAPClient - IMAP Client API that allows perl scripts to interact with IMAP message stores
POP-before-SMTP Mail Proxy Page
SMTP-after-POP - free perl script for efficient SMPT-after-POP on servers with sendmail 8.x and the UW IMAP4/POP3 server
Alessandro Dotti Contra's Archmbox is a simple perl script that parses one or more regular mbox files and archives all messages older than a specified date.

Pine and Pico Derivatives

Nano - smaller than pico but with more features. Nano satisfies both the free-software and open-source-software definitions.
MANA: Mail And News Agent -- Mana is based on Pine® version 3.91, and is free software and open-source software
PineCone
xPine

Uncategorized

Thorsten Glaser's pine.smime and pine.smime.init scripts are available in this comp.mail.pine message and (possibly) at Index of /tygs/pub
Daniel Feenberg's Redundant Mail Relays with Pine, Eudora and Outlook
Sending Problems with your NetIdentity.com account — useful information about gettting around an outbound SMTP port 25 block by the ISP that you use to jack in to the Net
Benchmarking mbox versus maildir
Patches for the University of Washington's IMAP server so it can serve maildir mailboxes are here, here, and here
c-client MBX mailbox format description
Miksen's IMAP@DAIMI Guide includes info on converting folders to c-client MBX format (some details are relevant only to their system)
groups.google.com: Re: Corrupt mbx mailbox: any fix? -- this comp.mail.imap message contains Mark Clements recovermbx which recovers a corrupted c-client MBX format mailbox to a traditional unix format mailbox
pinerc files at dotfiles.com (there's a fragment of a pinerc file with good color settings here)
Yu-Han Chang's Email Filtering: Machine Learning Techniques and an Implementation for the Unix Pine System (PDF); 6.891 Final Project, 1999, MIT
Setting the TimeZone for Unix and Windows/NT; and a list of possible TZ settings.
WebMuseum, Paris: Paul Cézanne: The Great Pine

MetaLinks (links to pages that link to pages about Pine)

Wishes

Wish #1: Feed Wishes

My #1 wish is that Pine supported protocols. I currently use the Genecast feed-to-NNTP service and the RssFwd feed-to-SMTP service, along with filters, to deflect feed items to some of my Pine incoming folders, but it would be great if Pine natively supported feed protocols (Atom, APP, RSS) in the same ways that it natively supports POP, IMAP, and NNTP (i.e., both via #move folders and via direct access). If the upcoming Alpine (Pine 5.0+) supported the Atom publishing format & protocol, we could say:

 ALPINE: Atom
         LDAP
         POP
         IMAP
         NNTP
         ESMTP client

Note: Since Alpine is free/libre open source software, anyone is free to patch and distribute a version of Alpine that supports feed protocols (hint, hint).

See Also: My blog item titled Email Clients That Don't Consume and Produce Feeds are Doomed.

Wish #1: Easy Zoom to RECENT Messages

News: Thanks to the Pine Team, this has been added to Pine 4.62, which was released 2005-Jan-18. To zoom to RECENT messages in Pine 4.62 and later, type the following in the Pine MESSAGE INDEX:

; S R Z

This means ;select Status Recent Zoom. I have gotten in the habit of typing the following when I open a very active mailing-list folder:

; S R Z $ H W ^Y

This means ;select Status Recent Zoom $sort tHread Where ^YfirstMsg. Since Pine buffers keystrokes, I can issue this sequence of commands before the folder has finished opening.

(The following is now mostly obsolete, but I'm leaving it here until I figure out where to move some of the useful non-obsolete info.) My #1 Pine wish is was to be able to use Pine's aggregate command operations to quickly select and zoom in on RECENT messages in the current mailbox. You can currently select based on the Status of messages by going to the MESSAGE INDEX and typing:

; S

Pine displays this prompt:

Select New, Deleted, Answered, or Important messages ?                                                      
 ? Help           N New             D Deleted         ! Not                                                 
^C Cancel         * [Important]     A Answered

Here “New” means “Not seen” (aka “Not read”) and there is no option to select messages with RECENT status. The workaround is to do one of the following:

Move the focus to the oldest RECENT message and select based on date (; D ^X CR). Note that this will also select NON RECENT messages that arrived on the date you last opened the mailbox readwrite (unless you last closed the mailbox at exactly midnight!).
If IMAPSTATUS is part of the index-format setting, use the ^W (Where) command and its ^X (Select Matches) subcommand on the MESSAGE INDEX screen to zoom in on messages that are Unread & Recent, i.e., which contain the string " N " (without the quote marks) in the IMAPSTATUS field. This will also match messages that contain the string " N " anywhere on the MESSSAGE INDEX screen.
Select based on message number, but this works only if the mailbox is sorted by Arrival or Reverse Arrival (also see Miscellaneous Pine Wishes below for my wishes related to selecting by number).

These workarounds are a pain to type and sometimes inaccurate. It would be great if selecting based on status (;S) presented a prompt similar to this:

Select Recent, NotRead, Deleted, Answered, or Important messages ?                                                      
 ? Help           R [Recent]      D Deleted       * Important                                                
^C Cancel         N NotRead       A Answered      ! Not

The reason I have made Recent the default (i.e., surrounded it with square brackets) is because it seems like it would be the most common selection — it certainly would be my most common selection!

Wish #2A: List the Relevant INBOX in Every IMAP Collection

In the current Pine (4.64), an IMAP FOLDER LIST displays a list of mailboxes and directories that are in a particular directory (or namespace) on an IMAP server. On many IMAP servers the INBOX, which is the user's default incoming mailbox on a particular IMAP server, is located in a completely separate location, for example /var/spool/mail/username, and it is not listed in any Pine FOLDER LIST. Instead, it needs to be specified in the Pine incoming-folders variable and is listed in the Pine Incoming-Folders pseudo collection. This means that it is impossible for a Pine user to get a single list of all her mailboxes on a particular IMAP server. One way to make this possible would be to give users an option like this:

[ Folder Preferences ] 
           :                                                                           
          [X]  enable-nickname-inbox-in-imap-collections

And then, if this option were set, every IMAP FOLDER LIST would contain the relevant INBOX, i.e., the INBOX for that user on that IMAP server. Since in Pine the string INBOX is reserved to mean the folder that is specified by the Pine inbox-path variable, the display name for this particular INBOX could be the Collection's nickname followed by the string -inbox. For example, if a Collection has the nickname Tuffmail, then the Tuffmail FOLDER LIST would look something like this:

PINE 4.64   FOLDER LIST
 
mailbox1
mailbox2
mailbox3
Tuffmail-inbox

I've placed Tuffmail-inbox at the end of the list because I think that's where I would prefer it, but this could be controlled by the folder-sort-rule or some other Pine setting. If a Collection did not have a nickname, the INBOX could either be not listed or be listed as simply -inbox.

A feature like this would be especially useful to people who have accounts at many different IMAP service providers. Currently setting up a new IMAP account requires editing the folder-collections variable and the incoming-folders variable. If a feature like this existed, a user would need only to specify an account in her folder-collections list and then she could access all mailboxes — including the INBOX — on that account from that Pine FOLDER LIST screen.

A possible alternative solution to this problem would be to use an IMAP namespace named, for example, #personal, which could be used to display all of a user's personal mailboxes (including INBOX). With such a namespace there would be no need to include the INBOX specification in the inbox-path or incoming-folders list because it would be automatically included in the #personal namespace. I discuss this idea in this 2005-May-26 message that I posted in comp.mail.imap. Does anyone know if such a namespace exists and if any IMAP server supports it?

Wish #2B: Improve the Collection Setup User Interface

In addition to wishing for the above Wish #2A collection functionality, I wish that the PINE SETUP screen made it easier for users to figure out how to set up an IMAP or NNTP collection. Currently the SETUP (MS) screen includes this:

 
PINE 4.64   SETUP
                    
(L) collectionLists:
    You may define groups of folders to help you better organize your mail.

I think it would be more clear if the word “account” appeared in this item. For example, maybe it could say something like this:

(L) collectionLists on local and remote systems:
    Define groups of folders on IMAP accounts, NNTP accounts, and on the local system

Also, move this item up near the top of the SETUP page where it will be more noticeable. Finally, I suggest including "IMAP Server" and "NNTP Server" on the SETUP CONFIGURATION (MSC) screen and telling users, e.g. in the built-in Help, that these are set up via the SETUP COLLECTION LIST (MSL) screen.

Wish #3: Filter Wishes

I wish that Pine filters . . .

were easier to directly edit in a Pine configuration file. Currently a Pine filter is specified as one (very) long line, as you can see in Eduardo Chappa's examples of Filtering From your Pinerc, and this can be extremely painful to edit. A possible solution would be to allow line continuation (e.g. using backslash (\), followed by linefeed, followed by whitespace) in the Pine patterns-filters2 variable. This would make it possible to split one Pine filter specification across multiple lines.
used the Sieve mail filtering language, which is on the path to becoming an Internet standard (see RFC 3028 and 3028bis). Sieve is used by Mulberry, Horde/IMP/Ingo, SquirrelMail/avelsieve, and other standards-based mail clients and servers.
supported the ManageSIEVE protocol so Pine users would have the option to upload some or all of their Pine filters to their mail server. These server-side filters would then be run on email messages when they arrive at the server.

To learn more about Pine filters, see Using a Pine Filter to Automatically Move Messages on the Power Pine page.

Tip: If you are looking for a provider that supports the ManageSIEVE protocol and server-side Sieve filters, check out the IMAP Service Providers page. For example, Tuffmail.com, supports Sieve and ManageSIEVE.

Wish #4: Keyword (Label) Wishes

News: Pine 4.62, which was released 2005-Jan-18, satisfies a number of these Keyword wishes -- thank you to the Pine Team! For details about keywords in 4.62, see Setting Up Keywords (Labels) on the Power Pine page, which I just updated to reflect the new 4.62 features. (I still need to update this section so that it also reflects the new 4.62 features.)

Starting with Pine 4.60, Pine supports keywords, which are also known as user-defined labels or user-defined flags. I describe how to set up and use keywords in Pine in Setting Up Keywords (Labels) on the Power Pine page. Here are some of my Pine keyword wishes.

Be able to set up the SUBJKEY token so that when it is used in the index-format:
- keywords are displayed in a color that is different from the color of the SUBJECT
- each keyword has its own color
- the surrounding squiggly braces can be eliminated or replaced with different delimiter characters (as I discuss here and here, I recommend using squiggly braces to surround "spam" and "big" tags that are injected into the beginning of the actual Subject header)
For an example of colored keywords in a message index, see the upcoming FastMail web-based IMAP client (also here) and this Gmail Sneak Peek.
Have two additional tokens: one that displays the initial (first letter) of each keyword and one that displays the full (non-abbreviated) keywords. These tokens could, for example, be called KEYINIT and KEY. The KEYINIT token would be similar to the IMAPSTATUS token and would be especially useful in the index-format variable. The KEY token could be used, along with the SUBJECT token, as an alternative to the SUBJKEY token.
Have a token called, for example, SUBJKEYINIT, which would be similar to SUBJKEY but instead of prepending the SUBJECT field with the full keywords, it would prepend the SUBJECT field with the initial (first letter) of each keyword.
Have an option to have no space between keywords in the SUBJKEY and in the above-wished-for KEYINIT, KEY, and SUBJKEYINIT tokens. This would save screen real estate and be especially useful when using single-character or initials of keywords.
Be able to sort (order) a mailbox by keyword so that messages with the same keyword are grouped together. If a message has multiple keywords, the sort could use the first keyword. One use of this would be to assign keywords based on spam probability and then be able to sort the messages by spam probability -- without needing to modify the actual Subject of each possibly-spam message (which is a technique I suggest in Sort a Mailbox by Spam Score above).
Be able to use the Where command (^W) to search for keywords that are displayed on the MESSAGE INDEX.
Enable keyboard shortcuts for applying/clearing each keyword. For example, it is currently possible to set the Important flag by typing ** (if enable-flag-screen-implicitly is not set). It would be nice to be able to apply my W (Waiting for a reply) keyword by typing *W, my E (Example) keyword by typing *E, etc.
On the FLAG MAINTENANCE screen:
- let the user specify the order that the flags/keywords are listed (currently system-defined flags are listed at the top)
- enable keyboard shortcuts for quickly setting/clearing flags/keywords
- list both the Keyword Real Name (e.g., $Label1) and the Keyword Nickname
- have commands available on this screen for adding, deleting, or re-ordering keywords
In addition to being able to use ;K to select messages with or without a specific keyword, be able to select messages that have no keyword set or that have at least one keyword set. In other words, be able to search for the existence (or non-existence) of an unspecified keyword. This would be useful if you use David Allen's Getting Things Done strategy and you want to make sure that you have assigned a keyword to every message.
Be able to select (;) messages based on keywords and other conditions that are in a pre-defined Rule pattern. This would make it possible to have saved “Views” or “Virtual Mailboxes.” According to this message, this will be possible in Pine 4.62.
Be able to set a keyword on a message that is in an NNTP or POP mailbox and then save it (the message and its keyword) to an IMAP mailbox. You can currently do this with the Important flag (*), but in order to do it with a keyword you need to 1) save the message to the target IMAP mailbox and 2) go to the target IMAP folder and set the keyword there.
Be able to set a keyword on an Fcc'd (Folder carbon copied) message or a postponed message. This would be especially useful if you use Pine as a Personal Information Manager (PIM) and use postponed or Fcc'd messages for To-Do list items. Note that Pine users can already control the status of Fcc'd messages by setting or clearing the mark-fcc-seen feature.
Have a variable similar to saved-msg-name-rule, maybe called saved-msg-key-rule, that could be used to automatically assign a keyword when saving a message.
Have Pine give a warning if a message contains a keyword that cannot be displayed by the current instance of Pine because it is not listed in this Pine's keyword variable. This could happen if, for example, the keyword was set by a delivery agent such as Procmail or by a different mail client or a different instance of Pine.
Have Pine give a warning if a keyword will be lost, for example if a message with a keyword is being copied to a server that does not support keywords.
In PC-Pine, be able to use the drop-down menu-bar Message menu (left-click) or the contextual pop-out menu (right-click) to set or clear a keyword. It is currently possible to do this with system-defined flags (Important, Answered, Deleted, etc.).

For more information about keywords, see:

Power Pine: Setting Up Keywords (Labels)
Compartmentalizing and Sharing Your Pine Configuration: Sample Configuration: Sample Keywords — this discusses the 22 user-defined keywords that I use
IETF Internet Draft: Common IMAP keywords by A. Melnikov, which proposes the following standard keywords: $Forwarded, $AutoJunk/$AutoNotJunk/$AutoMaybeJunk, $Junk/$NotJunk, $Work, $Personal, $ShouldReply, $Important.
IETF Internet Draft: SIEVE Mail Filtering Language: IMAP flag Extension by Alexey Melnikov
IMAP Service Providers: What to Look For in an IMAP Service Provider: This item and the item below it, which discuss servers, clients, and delivery agents that support IMAP keywords
comp.mail.imap thread: IMAP keywords (labels) / Annotate[more]
Procmail Quick Start: Setting Keywords or Labels
Mozilla: Mail & News: July 2001 Labels Specification (obsolete, but interesting) and Tufts Computing Mozilla User Manual: Color-Coding Messages. These discuss the 5 default Mozilla shortcut/nickname/color/keyword quadruplets, which are currently 1/Important/Red/$Label1, 2/Work/Orange/$Label2, 3/Personal/Green/$Label3, 4/To Do/Blue/$Label4, 5/Later/Purple/$Label5
My del.icio.us bookmarks related to Keywords and GTD (Getting Things Done).

Wish #5: Make it Easier to Change the Default From Header in Unix and Mac Pine

The most frequently asked question about Pine is “How do I change my From header?” This is an F-A-Q because you cannot set the user-id variable in Unix Pine and Pine's built-in Help for personal-name and user-domain do not explain . . .

What you need to do to get around not being able to set the `user-id` fragment of the email address.

Making this easier would help Pine adhere to the goals of the University of Washington, especially this goal:

“It is intended that Pine can be learned by exploration rather than reading manuals.”

And it would, I hope, reduce the frequency of this question in the Pine discussion groups! This was discussed in the pine-info mailing list and Frank Tobin posted an insightful message in which he said:

“If it was possible to do this from the on-line Pine configuration, such as you can do in the PC-Pine version, it wouldn't be a FAQ.”

Mike A. Harris responded with an eloquent message in which he said:

“A lot of software FAQ's exist because a program does not do what users expect it to do. An "FAQ" is a hint to software engineers to design the software in such a way that no FAQ is required.”

I responded with a possible solution that would make changing the From header easier.

Another possible solution is to change the Pine Setup screen so that the first item (or region of the Setup screen) were “Set Default Role” and a user would go there to set the default signature, template, Fcc, and headers (From, Organization, Bcc, etc.). In addition to making it easy to set the From header, this would help users to understand that these settings are an example of a role. I discuss roles and lots more about this on Changing Your From Header in Pine -- this page includes links to many other web pages that discuss this problem and its solutions.

Wish #6: Let Users Choose Their Default Local Mailbox Format

As I discuss above in my list of Pine Features, one of the great things about Pine is that it can access, update, and create many different local mailbox formats, including MH, c-client MBX, and traditional Unix mail spool (mbox) formats. And if a mailbox resides on an IMAP server, Pine lets the IMAP protocol and the IMAP server deal with the mailbox format so that any format that's supported by the server can be accessed, updated, and created by Pine. This includes MS Exchange, Lotus, Cyrus, maildir, and many other mailbox formats.

I am a big fan of modularization and in the ideal world, everyone would access mailboxes using a protocol such as IMAP or NNTP and the issue of mailbox formats would be dealt with by the protocol & the server and be independent of the client. Unfortunately, many of us use a system on which we do not have control of things like the IMAP server and we need to use old-fashioned file-system calls to access some of our mailboxes. For those of us in this situation, it would be great if it were possible for a user to tell Pine what default local mailbox format to use. For more about this issue, see:

UW PIC Pine FAQ 11.2: What are the advantages of the various mailbox formats Pine supports?
UW IMAP Server Documentation: formats.txt, drivers.txt (includes a driver comparison and using EXTRADRIVERS to enable or disable a driver), and naming.txt
pine-info mailing list: Re: folder format in pcpine -- this includes a message from Mark Crispin about how to use Unix mbox format with PC-Pine instead PC-Pine's default mailbox format, which is c-client MBX format
pine-info mailing list: Re: Pine under Windows with mbox
pine-info mailing list: Re: PC/PINE will not open my mailbox, help!
comp.mail.imap: Re: Using maildir type mailboxes — discusses using CREATEPROTO to specify the default driver for newly-created mailboxes
Rutgers: Setting Up IMAPD
UW PIC Configuration and Preferences Technical Notes: disable-these-drivers
ii.com Power Pine: Using (or Turning Off) the mbox Driver
.imaprc secrets revealed! (imaprc.txt) at the UW IMAP Information Center and at nurs.or.jp — new-folder-format and empty-folder-format are especially relevant
Deflexion.com: Setting Up UW IMAP and the "Dangerous" imaprc File on OS X (and other systems) — includes an example ~/.imaprc

If this is one of your Pine wishes, please participate in the pine-info discussion with subject Re: folder format in pcpine — it seems that this feature is being considered by the Pine Team!

Miscellaneous Pine Wishes

The Pine wishes in this section are in addition to my #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 wishes above and my categorized wishes below.

Be able to authenticate to an LDAP server. The current Pine (4.64) is able to access LDAP servers, but is not able to use a username & password to login to an LDAP server. For more about this wish, see my 2006-May-15 blog item titled Server-Side Address Books and Server-Side Greenlists. [LDAP authentication is supported in the upcoming Alpine (discussed above). In the Tuffmail forum, I wrote about how I set up Alpine to access the Tuffmail LDAP server.]
Be able to use the NextNew (TAB) command to step through the mailboxes in the current IMAP collection that contain “new” messages. This would be analogous to the way the NextNew command works in NNTP collections and in the Incoming-Folders pseudo collection.
When using ; (Select) to select messages based on message number, make it easy to select the first, last, and current message number. Currently you need to explicitly type these message numbers and in mailboxes with tens of thousands of messages, this is a pain because a message number can have 5 (or more) digits!
More participation in the Pine discussion groups by the Pine Team. To me, this lack of communication is one of the biggest negatives about Pine. Many of the other programs that I use -- for example Mulberry, FastMail.FM, Dreamweaver, and SpamAssassin -- have developers who regularly participate in their discussion groups and really seem to care about what their users want. For some insight into why this is a problem, see
- The Architecture of Participation in Tim O'Reilly's weblog
- The power of communities in Matthew Langham's weblog
Have the Pine Team use more of an open-development model for the development of Pine. For more about this, see the discussion in the section Free Software, Open-Source Software, and Pine above and the discussion in Redhat Bugzilla Bug 63235 - Create rpms for imap-utils.
Be able to create a role or a form letter with a pointer to an attachment so that the attachment is not attached until the role or form letter is used. This way the attachment will contain the current value rather than the value that was there when the role or form letter was created. You can work around this by creating scripts that invoke Pine with the -attach command-line argument, but it would be nice to be able to do this from within Pine.
Make it easy for a Pine user to have her reply to a mailing-list message automatically go only to the mailing-list address. This could be implemented using the List-Post or Mail-Followup-To header. For more about this, see the thread rfc 2369 commands in comp.mail.pine and What is a From Header and Where Do Replies Go.
Support for RFC 4315, IMAP - UIDPLUS extension, which would allow users to expunge some -- but not all -- messages that are marked for deletion in a mailbox. This would be useful for people who like to hold on to some of their trash before getting rid of it. A possible user interface for this would be to separate the eXpunge command into lower-case x and upper-case X and have upper case X expunge all messages that are marked for deletion and have lower case x expunge only messages that are both selected and marked for deletion. [UIDPLUS is supported in imap-2006+ and in the upcoming Alpine (discussed above).]
Be able to specify SMTP and NNTP servers in a role and in the composer headers. This way a user could be sure she is using an SMTP or NNTP server that accepts messages that are sent from her current IP address or with her current From header. Also a user could change the SMTP or NNTP server on the fly in the midst of composing a message. [Starting with Pine 4.50 (SMTP) and 4.56 (NNTP), it is possible to set these servers in a role. It is still not possible to set these on the fly while you are in the midst of composing a message.]
Clean up the way the character-set variable works in Pine. At a minimum, tell the user if a message that is about to be sent will be labeled as something other than US-ASCII. It would also be useful if there were an easy way to override the character set of a message that is being viewed when it doesn't display correctly.
Have a command that will reload the current mailbox. This would be useful if the current mailbox is closed (for whatever reason) or if a user wants to check for new messages in the current POP or NNTP mailbox. [Something like this is available in Pine 4.52 and later.]
Separate the Save command into a Copy command and a Move command. The Save command does a move if save-will-not-delete is not set (the default) and does a copy if save-will-not-delete is set. [Starting with Pine 4.62, the Save command has been split into two commands: S and S^R, which are used for move and copy.]
Be able to set up a Pine filter to either move or copy messages. Currently you can only move messages.
Be able to search either forward or backward and be able to search using regular expressions.
Put allow-changing-from in the regular feature list rather than the hidden feature list. This way a user will be able to easily tell if this feature is set or unset on her system. For more changing-from wishes, see my #3 Pine wish above.
The default folder collection is the first collection listed in the folder-collections variable. It would be much nicer — both for ease of editing and for compartmentalizing Pine settings — if this were defined in a separate variable, maybe called default-folder-collection.
Interpret multi-line URLs as recommended in RFC2396. The following example is at the bottom of both RFC2396 and w3.org's discussion of Wrappers for URIs in plain text:
```
Yes, Jim, I found it under "http://www.w3.org/Addressing/",
but you can probably pick it up from <ftp://ds.internic.
net/rfc/>.  Note the warning in <http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/
ietf/uri/historical.html#WARNING>.
```
If a message you view with Pine contains this text, the multi-line URLs (the second and third) are not correctly turned into links. FYI, Mulberry interprets these multi-line URLs correctly.
Be able to associate a news server and a newsrc file. These pairs could be set in the pinerc file using a variable named something like subscriptions, which, if set, would make it OK to leave the variables nntp-server, news-collections, and newsrc-path set to <Empty Value>. [This can be done in Pine 4.56 and later with the enable-multiple-newsrcs feature.]
Be able to compartmentalize the pinerc settings into an unlimited number of files. Currently you can use at most four files — pine.conf.fixed (available only with Unix Pine), pine.conf, pinerc, and pinercex. This way users could easily share just their feature-list, colors, or other parts of their pinerc with other Pine users and with their own other accounts. For example, Starv's color settings at dotfiles.com could easily be plugged into (or unplugged from) a pinerc. One way to allow unlimited pinerc modules would be to allow "include" statements in a pinerc file.
If we can't have the previous wish, allow PC-Pine to use an analog of pine.conf.fixed so that PC-Pine and Unix Pine can both use 4 configuration files and thus easily share them. Suggestion: Use %PINECONFFIXED% in PC-Pine to specify this fourth configuration file.
Have default file names and locations in PC-Pine for pine.conf and pine.conf.fixed so that a user doesn't have to use environment variables to specify these.
Be able to include the INHERIT token anywhere in a Pine list variable. Currently it must be first in the list. I discuss the INHERIT token in Compartmentalizing and Sharing Your Pine Configuration.
Have a variable that, if set, will tell pine to interpret the incoming-folder pseudo collection as a loop so that I could press TAB on the last incoming-folder and have pine loop back to the top of the list without asking me and continue checking incoming folders from there. [Pine 4.55+ includes the return-to-inbox-without-confirm feature which partly satisfies this wish.]
Be able to have more than one pseudo collection that could be loop TABbed through (see previous wish). This way I could easily monitor only my high-priority personal mailboxes. These Pine pseudo collections would be analogous to Mulberry's cabinets.
Be able to have a pseudo collection, similar to the incoming-folders pseudo collection, that lists all IMAP mailboxes to which the user has subscribed. This would be analogous to Mulberry's Subscribed cabinet.
Be able to use SHIFT+TAB to cycle backwards through the incoming-folders list.
Be able to collapse and expand subjects in the Message Index. This would be especially useful in discussion groups where one subject is often repeated many many times. In the collapsed view I could scan through the Message Index and see each subject listed only once. [This is implemented in Pine 4.50+.]
Be able to have some headers such as From, To, Newsgroup, and Subject be static on the message text screen so that when I'm reading a message that is longer than one screen, I could still see this information. A possibility is to display the index line (as specified by the index-format variable) at the top of the screen along with the status-line header.
Be able to specify more than one folder in the Fcc field so I could, for example, save a copy of the message on both my local machine and on a remote IMAP server.
Give Pine users the option to automatically add the recipients of outgoing messages to one (or more) address book. This would make it easy 1] to keep your address book up to date and 2] to keep your greenlist (aka whitelist) rule up to date (e.g., a Pine Filter Rule based on the From or ReplyTo is in address book? condition).
Be able to specify more than one address in a Bcc: header that is specified in the customized-hdrs variable. For example, let a user do something like this:
```
customized-hdrs=Bcc: address1 address2,
                Organization: Infinite Ink  <http://www.ii.com>,
                etc.
```
In Pine 4.63 and earlier, address1 and address2 must be separated by a comma, but commas are not allowed in a customized header (because the comma character is used to delimit the headers). Being able to automatically Bcc your messages is useful for both archiving and for checking the spamminess of messages you send. [This is possible in Pine 4.64+.]
Be able to configure Pine to automatically do login-before-SMTP authentication before attempting to send a message.

Status, Flag, and Label Wishes

Two of my high priority wishes are Easy Zoom to RECENT Messages and Keyword (Label) Wishes. Below are more of my status, flag, and label wishes.

Fix the Pine user interface and built-in Help files so that the terms New, Recent, Seen/Unseen, and Read/Unread are used consistently. These terms should be consistent within Pine and between Pine and its companion program, mailutil. For more about this, see the Terminology section in Checking for Recent Messages on my Power Pine page, The Status Section of Eduardo Chappa's Pine Filters page, and the next two wishes.
Have more STATUS and IMAPSTATUS symbols than A (answered), D (delete), * (important), N (recent & not read), R (recent & read), U (unrecent & unread), and blank (not recent & read). Right now I use * to flag messages that I need to respond to, messages that I need to read more carefully when I have time, and messages that I want to refer to later. I'd like to have at least three different "important" flags so I could distinguish these different types of "important" messages (so that all the Recent messages are contiguous). User-defined labels (aka keywords) would be one way to satisfy this wish. [As discussed in Setting Up Keywords (Labels) on the Power Pine page, IMAP keywords are available in Pine 4.60 and later.]
Be able to assign scores on the fly and have scores persist across Pine sessions so that they don't need to be recalculated each time Pine opens a mailbox. Scores could then be used as a type of STATUS or IMAPSTATUS flag (see previous wish).

Pine Built-In Editor and Pico Wishes

Be able to move to the top or bottom of a page using a single keystroke such as the standard Unix ^ and $ or the Windows (and Mac?) Home and End keys, rather than Pine's cumbersome ^W^Y and ^W^V.
Commands to move up or down half a page.
Be able to save (write out) a message that you are composing without exiting Pico.
Be able to use a .picorc file to set Pico configuration options.

Security-Enhancement Wishes

For information about Pine security, see the Security and Privacy Features section above and the Security section of my Power Pine page.

Pine's internal viewer does rudimentary rendering of HTML. For most email attachments that are MIME type text/html, Pine's internal viewer is all the rendering that I want! To avoid running a malicious script contained in an HTML attachment, it would be great if it were possible to tell Pine to view an attachment that is of type text/html in Pine's internal viewer. One possible solution is to add a feature called show-html-text-internally, which would work the same way that the feature show-plain-text-internally works. Another possible solution is to be able to specify the “Pine internal viewer” in the mailcap file.
Currently when an attachment is selected and a user presses Enter (or double clicks the attachment name, or types > or V), the attachment is opened using the default “display method” for that type of attachment. Instead, I think the About Attachment screen should be displayed and then the user, if he wanted to, would open the attachment from the About Attachment screen. This way the user would be forced to look at the details of the attachment and the program that it will be opened with before he opens it. [This is partially implemented in Pine 4.50 & higher, and can be turned off using the new quell-attachment-extra-prompt feature.]
Opening an attachment should be harder than double clicking or pressing the Enter or > or V key. All these are done constantly during a Pine session and it is too easy to do these reflexively. Instead, I think that opening an attachment should not be the default action (i.e. not what happens when you press Enter) and a user should have to explicitly issue an “open attachment” command. And maybe the command should be a key combination so that the user really thinks before doing it. For example, it could be ^V, ^O, or ^L ( for “View,” “Open,” or “Launch”).
When a user issues a command to open an attachment, display a message that says something like “WARNING: Attachments can contain viruses. Open this attachment anyway?” and have the default (pressing Enter) be No.
Let a user specify an alternate “display method” -- while in the midst of a Pine session -- if she does not want to use the default display method. It is possible to pipe an attachment to a program, for example cat, but it would be nice if Pine could be set up to present the user with a list of display methods.
Be able to use Pine filters to filter on MIME headers such as Content-Type, Content-ID, Content-Transfer-Encoding, and Content-Description.
You can have your Pine Message Index display the number of attachments in each message by including the token named ATT in your index-format setting. When you mark an attachment for deletion, it is not actually deleted until you save the message to another folder. It would be useful to have an index-format token that could be used to specify in the index (maybe using a lower case d) if any attachment has been marked for deletion but not yet deleted. This way you wouldn't accidentally keep a potentially malicious attachment around any longer than you want. (Note: Putting ATT in index-format slows down Pine.)
Make it easier to expunge an attachment from a message. For example, have the Expunge command (X) do this.
Make it possible for a user to change the name of the file where passwords are stored so intruders can't easily find it. The default is pine.pwd and Unix Pine users need to edit the source and recompile Pine to change this file name. PC-Pine users have no way to change this. I discuss the advantages of using non-standard file and directory names on the Infinite Ink (ii.com) Power Pine page in the security section. [As discussed in Using the -passfile and -nowrite_passfile Command-Line Arguments on the Power Pine page, this is possible starting with Pine 4.43.]
Use stronger encryption to encrypt the password file, pine.pwd.
Be able to encrypt and decrypt folders from within Pine.
Make it possible for Pine to process encrypted message folders.
Ship Pine with a sample mailcap file for the paranoid, maybe called mailcap.paranoid.
Be able to set up Pine so it does not reveal the user's login name, user's machine name or IP address, or personal (non-public) email address. [Pine 4.51 includes two new features called disable-sender and scramble-message-id that help to hide this information!]

GUI and PC-Pine Wishes

Be able to double click anywhere on a word and have it selected. I'd like to be able to do this on any screen in both Pine and Pico.
Give PC-Pine users the option to have selected text automatically copied to the clipboard. This is standard mouse behavior in Unix Window Systems (xterm) and configurable in some MS Windows applications such as SecureCRT.
Be able to use the pipe command in PC-Pine so MS-Windows users can easily use PGP and other sending and display filters. [This is implemented in Pine 4.60 and later.]
Be able to select a group of messages from a Pine folder index using the mouse. For example, using standard MS Windows SHIFT+Click or CTRL+Click to select contiguous or discontiguous sets of messages.
A true GUI Pine for Unix Window Systems, MS Windows, Mac OS X, and other GUI desktop environments, that would support, for example, dragging & dropping messages into mailboxes.
Make the source code available for the current PC-Pine (4.64). The source code is available for PC-Pine 3.96 and earlier.

Other People's Wish Lists

For more Pine wishes, including some more of my Pine wishes, see the Pine wishlists of Sven Guckes, Aaron Hawley, and the Freshmeat Pine page.

The Mutt wish list contains a lot of things that I'd like to see in Pine.

Pine Promotion

Why Promote Pine

If you are a fan of standards-compliant software, open-source software, modularized software, or any of the other things that I list in the Pine philosophy section above, please help spread the word about Pine 4.64. Even if you do not use Pine, or you do not use it as both an IMAP client and NNTP client, you can still fight closed-source, proprietary, non-standards-compliant software by letting people know that Pine is an alternative to bloated, proprietary, non-standards-compliant, non-modularized IMAP and NNTP clients.

News and Email Software Lists

If you see a list of mail or news clients for a platform that Pine runs on and Pine isn't listed, ask the author to add Pine to the list. Many people do not know there is a Win32 version of Pine or that Pine is also a news reader so Pine, unfortunately, does not show up in a lot of lists it should be in.

Here are sites that include Pine in both mail and news client lists:

eMailman: Unix email and news clients, Windows email and news clients, BeOS email and news clients
Yahoo > Computers and Internet > Software > Internet > Email and Usenet
Blindness-Related Resources on the Web and Beyond

Here are sites that include Pine in only their mail client lists:

Open Directory Project (dmoz.org): Computers: Software: Internet: Clients: Mail
About.com Unix and Windows email clients. Their Pine page gives Pine a rating.
LinuxApps.com MUAs
Freshmeat's Console/Email
TUCOWS Linux at DownCity or Easynet
Winfiles.com Win 95/98 Mail Clients (they list Pine 3.96)
LocateSoftware.com Internet Email Tools (they list Pine 3.96)
ZDNet Software Library: E-mail & Newsreaders (they list Pine 3.96 and describe it as an email client rather than a news & email client)
RunningWolf SMTP/POP3 clients

And here are some sites that do not include Pine at all:

PCWORLD.COM: Topics > Downloads > Internet > E-Mail
Stroud's CWSApps Email Clients for Windows 95
TUCOWS Windows Email Clients for Windows 95

If you are inspired, ask the last two to add PC-Pine to their mail client lists, ask the last nine to add Pine or PC-Pine to their news reader lists, and ask all these sites to list the latest version of Pine (4.64).

Service Provider Support Pages

If your service provider has support pages telling users how to set up mail and news clients to access messages on their system, ask them to include instructions for Pine (if they don't already have them). On my IMAP Service Providers page, I have a growing list of IMAP service providers and for each of them, if it exists, a link to their Pine page. Please let me know about other IMAP service providers and the URL to their Pine page.

Interoperability

Check to see if Pine can be used as a plug-in mailer or news reader in your web browser and other news-enabled and mail-enabled applications. If it can't, ask the application's developers to make it possible in a future release.

Polls, Votes, Ratings, and Discussions

When you find out about polls, votes, ratings, or discussions of mail or news clients, please participate and tell the Pine community about it by posting to comp.mail.pine. You can submit your vote, rating, or comment right now to . . .

Zoomerang's Email Survey. [In order to take this survey with Opera, you need to set it up to identify itself as Netscape or IE.]
EmailDiscussions.com > Email Service Provider-specific Forums > FastMail.FM > Poll: What do you use to read/send email? Before you can vote in this poll or participate in the discussions, you need to register at EmailDiscussions.com.
Freshmeat's Pine page — to affect Pine's rating, click on “Rate this project”; to affect Pine's popularity, click on “Subscribe to new releases”
About.com Poll: How do you access your email server? A vote for IMAP is a vote for Pine since Pine is one of the best IMAP clients. (To successfully submit your vote, you need to have javascript enabled in your browser.)
Submit a suggestion to Download.com asking them to include PC-Pine in their Windows mail and news client sections, and Unix Pine in their Linux and Mac sections. Once these are listed, submit your rating and opinion!
PlanetFeedback by using their service to write a letter to the University of Washington. According to the 4 March 2001 New York Times article I Scream, You Scream: Consumers Vent Over the Net, “PlanetFeedback invites positive as well as negative feedback, and says that almost half the letters it sends to companies are compliments. The site 'grades' companies receiving more than 25 letters.”
Slashdot poll on Which email client do you use?
MisterPoll Best Email Client

The current results of the first, third and fourth polls are available at the links above and the MisterPoll results are at Results: Best Email Client. The results of the now finished About.com Vote for the Best Email Client are at About.com's Pine User Page.

Your Signature

For messages sent to public discussion groups, use a signature that tells people you are using Pine. For example, when I post from my Linux machine I sometimes use this signature to spread the word about both Pine and Debian Linux:

 -- 
 Nancy McGough            www.deflexion.com            www.ii.com
 ----== Sent via Alpine 0.9999 running on Debian GNU/Linux ==----

And when I post from a non-Linux machine I sometimes use the following signature to remind people that Pine is a POP, IMAP, and NNTP client, and that it runs on Unix, MS Windows, and Mac OS X:

 --  
 Nancy McGough                www.deflexion.com               www.ii.com
 -= Sent via Alpine 0.9999: POP, IMAP, NNTP & ESMTP for Unix/Win/OS X =-

In both of these sigs I include the version number to get the word out that there is a new version of Pine. If you are not using the latest version of Pine, I suggest that you do not include the version number in your sig (why advertise the fact that you're not on the cutting edge?!).

You are welcome to use the last line of my sigs, or a modified version, in your signature. Let's not let ads in signatures from messages posted from Deja.com, Remarq, Yahoo, CNET help.com and other commercial news readers take over Internet discussion groups!

~~Your X-Message-Flag Header~~

If someone is using Outlook and a message contains an X-Message-Flag header, Outlook flags the message and displays the content of the header in the Outlook Information Bar, which is prominently displayed at the top of the message. Below is how I used to set the customized-hdrs variable in my pinerc (i.e., before the X-Message-Flag header became a spam indicator). The first one (Organization) spreads the word about my business, Infinite Ink, and the second one spreads the word about Pine to Outlook users:

customized-hdrs=Organization: Infinite Ink  http://www.ii.com,
  X-Message-Flag: Worried about bugs & viruses? Switch to Mac/Unix/PC Pine! Info @ www.ii.com

Thanks to William R. Van Kuyk, you can see a picture of how the content of my X-Message-Flag header appears in Outlook (it's only 21 KB so shouldn't take too long to download & view it). If you want to vary the contents of your X-Message-Flag and sometimes not use it, do not include X-Message-Flag in your customized-hdrs but instead use roles and the Set Other Hdrs action to specify the X-Message-Flag.

Important Notes About the X-Message-Flag Header

Many spam-detection tools increase the spam-probability of a message if it contains an X-Message-Flag header. Because of this, I no longer use, or recommend the use of, the X-Message-Flag header.
The content of Pine customized-hdrs cannot contain a comma (,). For more about customizing headers in Pine, see Changing Your From Header in Pine.
If the content of the X-Message-Flag header contains more than 100 characters, users of Outlook (pre Outlook 2000) will not be able to open the message, so keep it under 100 characters!
If an Outlook user is viewing the message on an IMAP server, the X-Message-Flag header is not displayed because the IMAP protocol does not recognize this “flag.”

See Rodney Haywood's The Anti-Outlook Page (which is archived here) from more about the X-Message-Flag header and other ways to annoy Outlook user. Please tell me if you have more information about this mysterious header.

Your Web Site

A lot of people, including me, are interested in what software other people use. To help satisfy people's curiosity, I suggest that you add a blurb on your site about what software you use and don't forget to mention Pine! Here are examples of people doing this:

Alan G. Isaac's Software for Economists in the Email section
Aaron Hawley's Suggested Computer Applications
David Coppit's How to make Windows Livable
My author blurb for the book Internet Secrets

If you use Pico to edit your web pages, you might want to use one of the pico banners, which are available on Michael S. Ellars' Whatever site, to spread the word about Pine's composer.

More Ads

Thanks

Thanks to...

the Pine Team
the people who have web pages that help people use Pine
the people who help out in the Pine and Pine-related discussion groups
ISAMET for giving me a Mulberry license so I could research and write the Mulberry versus Pine section
Johan Pae and Alan J. Flavell who extracted respectively the green and red Pine icons from PC-Pine for me
everyone around the Net who is working to promote open-source software, modularized software, and software that adheres to standards
the people who send me thank-you notes and buy books through Infinite Ink's Bookstore
the people who link to Infinite Ink's Pine pages, including those who show up in the results of these searches:
- use Yahoo! to search for pages that link to this page (www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/) or to the Power Pine page (www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/pc/)
- use Google to search for pages that link to this page (www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/) or to the Power Pine page (www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/pc/)
- use WhoLinksToMe.com to see who links to this page
the people who bookmarked this All About Pine page, who bookmarked the Power Pine page, who bookmarked the IMAP Service Providers page, who bookmarked the Procmail Quick Start, and who bookmarked the Reverse Spam Filtering page in their del.icio.us bookmarks. If you are a registered del.icio.us user and if you like this page, please add this All About Pine page to your del.icio.us bookmarks.

How You Can Show Your Appreciation for Pine

To show your appreciation for Pine, please...

Help out in Pine and Pine-related discussion groups.
Create web pages that help people to use Pine or IMAP or any of the utilities associated with these.
Contribute your Pine or alternate editor settings that are related to Pine to dotfiles.com.
Report Pine bugs.
Use PlanetFeedback, which I discuss in Polls, Votes, Ratings, and Discussions above, to send a compliment to the University of Washington. Once 25 letters are sent to the UW through PlanetFeedback, they will include the UW in their ratings. BTW, the Pine team really likes receiving compliments!
Do some or all of the things that I suggest in the Pine Promotion section.


All About Pine: POP, IMAP, NNTP, & ESMTP Client for Unix, MS Windows, and Mac OS X <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/> Copyright © Infinite Ink & Nancy McGough	updated 08-May-2006 tweaked 27-Sep-2007

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

History of the Pine Program and Its Name

Why Use Pine

Why Some People Think Pine is for Wimps

Pine and Pico Vulnerabilities in Older Versions

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

1996-2003: Problem Resolved

2003: The Problem Returns

Comparison of Pine and Its Main Competitors

The Non-GUI Arena: Mutt versus Pine

IMAP Arena 1: Mulberry versus Pine

IMAP Arena 2: SeaMonkey Suite and Thunderbird versus Pine

Why Some People Prefer Pine: Praise for Pine

Essential Companion to Other Mail Clients and Tools

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

Sort a Mailbox by Spam Score

Sort a Mailbox by Size

Miscellaneous Pine Praise

Philosophy

Seven Philosophical Reasons to Use Pine

Free/Libre Open Source Software and Pine

Philosophy Summary

Key Features

Security and Privacy Features

Miscellaneous Features

Sample Commands

Discussion Groups

Flames

LINKS

Wishes

Wish #1: Feed Wishes

Wish #1: Easy Zoom to RECENT Messages

Wish #2A: List the Relevant INBOX in Every IMAP Collection

Wish #2B: Improve the Collection Setup User Interface

Wish #3: Filter Wishes

Wish #4: Keyword (Label) Wishes

Wish #5: Make it Easier to Change the Default From Header in Unix and Mac Pine

What you need to do to get around not being able to set the user-id fragment of the email address.

Wish #6: Let Users Choose Their Default Local Mailbox Format

Miscellaneous Pine Wishes

Status, Flag, and Label Wishes

Pine Built-In Editor and Pico Wishes

Security-Enhancement Wishes

GUI and PC-Pine Wishes

Other People's Wish Lists

Pine Promotion

More Ads

Thanks

How You Can Show Your Appreciation for Pine

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

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

What you need to do to get around not being able to set the `user-id` fragment of the email address.