My school added an "amazing new webmail feature" this year, but I really wasn't that impressed with it. The sad thing is that they probably paid some company for the webmail app, even though you can download several different ones at freshmeat.net for free.

Anyway, the point is that PINE is still used today even though many consider it antiquated. For people like myself who know all the shortcuts and don't mind an all-text interface, it's superb.

So, PINE is certainly not dead, and many of us still use it on occasion when away from the office. It's much faster than VNCing into your home box and using Outlook.

When you're on the go, give PINE a call ;-)

... watching it change is like watching evolution in motion.

Hum, not quite yet [ximian.com]. But, it is definitely catching up.

Bah... /usr/ucb/Mail rules!

FreeBSD says this when I try to make PINE from ports:

SECURITY NOTE: The pine software has had several remote vulnerabilities discovered in the past, which allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary code as you on your local system, by the action of sending a specially-prepared email. All such KNOWN problems have been fixed, but the pine code is written in a very insecure style and the FreeBSD Security Officer believes there are likely to be other undiscovered vulnerabilities. Do you wish to proceed with the installation of pine anyway?

Does the new version address any of the issues that lead to this message appearing?

Screenshot [stanford.edu] of PINE in action.

I'm still a loyal pine user, having cut my teeth first with "mail". What I've noticed, however, is that just about everyone I know who was a happy pine user is now a happy mutt [mutt.org] user. I'm only a holdout on switching because I haven't really investigated the differences (if it ain't broke...), but my sense is that by popular majority among CLI mail readers I know, mutt is where you go to get "better-than-pine".

- DDT

Pine is a really nice mail app, for sure. But I still think it has one of the quirkiest licenses [washington.edu] of any source-available application out there. It specifically forbids development and support of branches of the codebase -- if I add a cool new feature that the maintainers refuse to add (web browsing, maybe), then I can't split off and make "Joe's Pine," I have to distribute a diff file with the original source tarball.

Good for them. I myself just released 2.10, for a can of pop and bag of chips. That comes on the heels of a 1.30 release, into a parking meter.

I stopped using pine as my mail client (about three years
i was using it) for three reasons:

1. Doesn't support Maildir in the main code, only thru third-party patches, and pine guys rejects to add Maildir
support to the code, and nobody can do it and publish it,
because of their license.

2. Is not GPL

3. Mutt is waaaaay more configurable

Get your brand new green PINE tree in time to decorate for christmas! You could mod it with all blue lights... imagine a beowulf cluster of christmas trees! Merry Christmas to all!

Seriously though, threads help a ton in organizing messages. :)

In other news, pine would have done this years ago had it truly been free software. Since they don't allow people to distribute modified versions, and they don't like to accept featere enhancements nobody does any work on it. For that reason, everybody with the patience to look for and learn something better has moved on to other text based mail clients.

Imagine that pine was first released in 1989 [washington.edu] and yet the latest version number is reasonable. If this was something else - going to be polite and not mention it :) - you know what it would be like. I mean there's a point in it - the project is more than 10 years old but has stayed very consistent for the whole time. And talking about email clients, that's a miracle.

Have you ever read the project history linked above: " Our goal was to provide a mailer that naive users could use without fear of making mistakes. We wanted to cater to users who were less interested in learning the mechanics of using electronic mail than in doing their jobs; users who perhaps had some computer anxiety". I think they have succeeded well, even now when everyone is used to having all the graphical bells and whistles my Mom - who had never used email before, learned pine quicker than outlook (she never learnt to use it, actually).

I'm really curious to know how many users still use pine? I remember when I first got in college, it was the "easiest" mail application for an UNIX-newbie, so I used it for about a week (I didn't like it, so I found out about Emacs VM and never used pine again :-), but now I think things have changed a bit, no?

I mean, very new users tend to use graphical interfaces for almost everything... And there are plenty graphical MUAs ou there. And old, more "advanced" users tend to use more sofisticated or powerful MUAs (graphical or non-graphical), like Emacs' VM, Mutt, etc.

So.... does Pine really still maintain a user-base? If so, what would be the reasons for these users sticking with Pine? (As you can see, I'm not a Pine fan ;), but anyways, I'd like to hear from those who are...).

Ah, my first "real" e-mail program

Careful, captain. Some of us are still using Pine.

Of course I'm not surprised by the reaction. My mother saw me sshing to my box once and said "Oh God, that brings back horrible memories..." Who says that UI has nothing to do with End User acceptance? Me personally: I love it. But to most people its like "Why do you go out hunting with a bow and arrow when we can get perfectly good meat down at the Kroger?"

Pine Users: the Ted Nugents of the Computing World!

A quick search on the changelog reveals nothing improved about the years-old problems [washington.edu] with Pine and S/MIME. It simply can't invoke plugins for GPG to check or generate messages that have the GPG signature as an attachment. Which means that 80% of the GPG-signed email that I get is useless and that Pine still does not handle the S/MIME RFC. (The other 20% is handled by patches or stopgaps [quantumlab.net].)
Sigh. I know Mutt is better, but I still use Pine 4.44. I just don't trust those scripts that add Pine keybindings to Mutt.. :)

watching it change is like watching evolution in motion.

...except that evolution is faster.

Score: -1 (Troll)

is improved, but not new: it has been there in some form since at least version 4.30 [washington.edu].

And don't forget about pico (pine composer), which has been making bad programmers worse for more years than I care to remember.

I have found that copy and paste (from somewhere else, into pine/pico) using highlight/middle button in X sessions results in a tangled mess -- particularly if it's over some other text, this text is overwritten and whatnot.

Does anyone know if the new version of pine&pico has fixed this problem? I find it to be a big obstacle to useability. Merci.

Well, not many people may realize it, but the UW has been working on a newer version of Pine then what was just released. Many schools have their own webmail program (UW had this really bad one for a while), but UW has been developing what it calls Webpine for a long time now accessable at webpine.washington.edu [washington.edu] if you're a UW student (links to find out more are on the page. It works pretty well, when accessing my old UW email account, I generally log into webpine (I don't have shell access anymore so normal pine is out the window). Given time, and ways to speed the process up for those of us unfortunate enough to be on dialup (broadband isn't always the fastest for some parts of it either), and this could be really good. It's written at least partially in tcl.

Yes I admit it, I still use pine even if its not free software. Why? Its to my knownledge the only email client that supports remote imap properly. By that I mean one that doesnt try to re-download the whole list of all messages in the folder like mutt (Very usefull with huge folders). Evolution would probably do the job as it keeps a local copy. But it was way to unstable the last time I tried it. And I need something that I can use over the network.

Any mutt user can tell me if mutt now supports imap properly? And don't tell me gnus is the solution, even if I'm starting to consider it...

I've been using PINE for a long time; this does not make me a power user of PINE so much as someone who has eventually had a very few useful bits of information blasted at me enough to have left a small groove in my brain like a flatworm. (Right animal I'm thinking of?) Here's one thing that I hope you find useful: how to use PINE's filters.

Many people, in fact, don't realize that PINE has a very nice filter system. Yes, there *is* a fine manual for pine, but not that many pithy HOWTOs. Or maybe there are -- google searches eventually brought this information to light for me, and I'm just paraphrasing it here for your convenience :)

So. Let's say you use pine, and want to stop, interrogate and file away from your sensitive eyeballs all email that contains the giveaway snippet "this email cannot be considered spam". Here's a step-by-step guide -- it's only this long to provide assurance; once you start the process, you can probably ignore my steps and simply follow the on-screen prompts.

1) fire up pine if it's not already running.

2) Hit "M" if you're not at the Main screen. My PINE session is setup to take me straight to my inbox, but yours may already bring you right to your main screen, but at any rate hitting M can't hurt :)

3) (OK, this is really three steps in one) Hit "S" for Setup; Hit "R" for Rules; Hit "F" for Filter, because that's the type of Rule you want to add.

6) The screen you're now looking at is a bit intimidating, but it's really like a gruff pal who is actually friendly once you're past his exterior. Highlighted already is a line that says "No Value Set: using "Filter Rule": at this point, hit return and give your filter an appropriate name. I usually say something like "[keyword description] [(reason)]" -- in this case, I'd make it "this email cannot be considered spam (spam)." From here on out, use your arrow keys or tab around to fill in the relevant information.

7) Let's do this example section by section.
In the top section, the one headed by the line "CURRENT FOLDER CONDITIONS BEGIN HERE," you most likely will not have to do anything; the default is probably to make the filter affect your inbox, which is what I (and I'm guessing most people) usually want.

8) Next section, "FILTERED MESSAGE CONDITIONS BEGIN HERE," that is, looks more complicated than it is. You can ignore the fields you don't care about by just leaving them blank. If you were trying to block all messages from "stalker99@aol.com," you would put that address in the field labeled "From pattern." In our present example, go down to the field "AllText pattern," hit return to give yourself an input field, and type in (or paste in) "this email cannot be considered spam". In fact, "cannot be considered spam" by itself might be even smarter. I avoid punctuation in my spam filters; you want matches, and shorter phrases give more matches.

9) Almost done :) Scroll down, ignoring a few sections, to the section "ACTIONS BEGIN HERE" and the subsection "Filter action =" Go down to the line "Folder List = " and hit return (again, this is the way you get a text entry field). Type in the name of a folder to which you would like the dreck blasted; "spam" is what I call mine. If the folder does not yet exist, PINE will prompt you and ask if you want to create it; this is a useful catch in case you accidentally try to filter it to "span" instead.

10) Hit "E" to "Exit Setup." When PINE asks "Commit changes ("Yes" replaces settings, "No" abandons changes)? " hit Y for Yes. You now have a filter in place! :) If it corresponds to a piece of spam currently in your inbox, you should see a message like "moving one filtered message to "spam.""

11) Return to you inbox; "M" for Main and "I" for inbox should do it. If your filter was well applied, you should be down one spam :)

Note: you can set up filters on ingoing mail for your friends as well as the jerks of the world; you can filter all mail from your old buddies to a folder "pals," and mail from coworkers to "job_mail," etc, by using the "From pattern" field rather than the AllText pattern, for instance.

Then, to read your sorted email, look in the folders you have created, because the incoming messages will be sorted into them. i.e., if you create a "friends" folder, you must open that folder to see the mail which has been sorted into it.

This is a very incomplete look at PINE's filters, but I hope it is useful to you. If you explore the options available on the filter creation page, for instance, you can see that you can also sent junk mail straight to the toilet by deleting it unread; this has resulted in some false positives for me, so I try not to do this any more.

Cheers,

timothy

Much better than Elm, actually, as Elm didn't handle MIME stuff and character sets properly (at least in the time Pine did).

I consider the following the best advantages of Pine:

• Doesn't require windowing system - works nicely through ssh, so you can read mail on one server from whereever you are.
  
• It doesn't need mouse for anything.
  
• Is very compact on screen - all GUI email clients need practically full screen. Pine reuses the entire space of screen and doesn't waste it with frames like all GUI clients do.
  
• Pressing 's' saves mail to mailbox according to sender's username. No need to drag with mouse.
  
• Saves sent mail to folder according to receiver's username, or whatever you write to the Fcc field. Not cramming everything to an annoying "sent-mail" folder.
  

These are my reasons for still using Pine at home. At work, I use KMail, mainly because I need to handle attachments more easily, but also because of easier IMAP configuration. KMail is rather good, though not without problems, and lacks all the important features of Pine listed above. Most annoying problem with KMail is that downloading mail through IMAP seems to be very slow for me (about 30 secs for a megabyte).

Ah, my first "real" e-mail program; watching it change is like watching evolution in motion.

if by real, you mean one you run from a unix shell, sure. if you mean one with geek chic, not quite.

pine was what was showed to people who couldn't figure out something like mm (which i still miss. *sigh*)

i gotta say though, i never agreed with the MUA machismo. i've used mm, mh, rmail, mh-e, outlook, quickmail, mutt, and eudora. (not to mention less & grep in some dire situtations.) i say, use whichever you like or find useful. these days i personally like mutt for my work email (on a unix desktop), but like eudora for my home mail.

i think the real studs are on the MTA side. seperate the world into those who've configured sendmail and those who haven't. anyone who's done that without going mad gets my respect.

-Bill

pine and pico are distributed together right?

For those of you that want to get away from pico, try GNU nano [nano-editor.org].

Has a lot more to it than Pico, but still easy for all the people that don't like vim or emacs.

The stock threading in Pine 4.50 is STILL wrong, but the patch I've been running here [washington.edu] for over a year works perfectly (in fact, my name is actually in the patch itself for a similar bug). Let me explain:

When you want to sort your mail, so the newest messages arrive at the top (normal for anyone who reads a LOT of mail), you set Pine to sort by "Reverse Arrival". Using the patch, I hit 'k', and now I expose threads, but ONLY the first message of the thread is sorted in reverse-arrival mode (as it should be). All replies to that thread are shown consecutively underneath it in normal arrival mode (replace dots for spaces, Slashdot strips them):

Nov 22...Message 1

Nov 22...Message 2
Nov 18...Message 3
Nov 19...+---Re: Message 3 (repl 1)
Nov 20.......+---Re: Message 3 (repl 2)
Nov 22...........+---Re: Message 3 (repl 3)
Nov 15...Message 4

With the threading in the new Pine 4.5, without using the threading patch (which was written by wash.edu, btw), you get:

Nov 22...Message 1

Nov 22...Message 2
Nov 22...........+---Re: Message 3 (repl 3)
Nov 20.......+---Re: Message 3 (repl 2)
Nov 19...+---Re: Message 3 (repl 1)
Nov 18...Message 3
Nov 15...Message 4

And there's no way to stop it. Sorting by Reverse-Arrival hides threads.

Sorting by Threads sorts upside-down (as above).

Sorting by Reverse-Threads puts new messages at the bottom.

I've been a happy user of Pine for 10 years (or however long it has been out), but I can't upgrade to this when such a core function is non-working like this (incidentally, don't tell me to try mutt, I've tried mutt, and it can't even come remotely close in features to what last-year's pine can do, not to mention the exploitable holes with mutt's file browser).

I guess I'll report this again, and hope that Eduardo [washington.edu]can come up with a quick patch to fix it.