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PINE Releases 4.50
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The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
Still useful (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Still loyal (Score:5, Interesting)
- DDT
No, thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Still useful (Score:5, Interesting)
I implemented a Web Mail system where I work this year for students - downloaded for free from horde.org [horde.org]. Its a very powerful system and is currently serving 30,000 student accounts on a mid priced Dell server.
But back onto the topic, I have tried quite a few email applications in my time - the college where I work has recently just phased out out old POP3 Linux mail server in favour of an Exchange 2000 server. To be fair, it has been pretty good so far.
But Pine has to be one of my very favourite email apps - small, quick, and very easy to use. I even found that Windows users with no experience of *nix could get to grips with Pine pretty quickly, which is no mean feat.
I'll make sure I download this version
Pine is great, but the licence... (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunatly the licence is not good. While the source is available, distributing changed versions is illegal. This for example makes it illegal for Debian to fix its paths and distribute it, or for me to make a graphical version (anyone remember xpine?)
That means I've now given up on it. Fortunatly there are fairly good replacements, like mutt with pine bindings, or kmail via aalib.
pine2mutt (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Users? (Score:3, Interesting)
Amen! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a simple interface, with everything documented WITHIN THE PROGRAM (main reason I don't use vi), and best of all, it comes with Pico, which I think is the most cool, kickass little text editor. Pico on my servers combined with Putty on my Win2k workstation equals easy code and script editing.
Anyway, just my two simolians.
Re:Users? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now at my final year at my huge university it is still what I use. It is very quick, very small, and I can get to it using every differant computer I use. (I use a *lot* of differant computers.) I see absolutly no advantage that a GUI mail client offers me. I use procmail for spam anyway, and I don't exactly have the most complex mail needs. Pine just works well and I have never said, "Oh, If only I could be able to do X".
So that is why I still use pine. Most of my freinds use it too. In a few months when I leave college I will just setup fetchmail and continue to ssh into my own box to check mail with pine.
And speaking of mutt, it is not installed on the student unix cluster my school maintains so I have never had the chance to use it.
University of Washington not using new version yet (Score:2, Interesting)
E - email: Electronic mail (Pine version 4.44)
So maybe they haven't gotten around to it yet...
More Pine being worked on (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Users? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a bit frustrating, I've tried mutt/VM/Gnus and I like them but it's too much work for a few nice features.
Re:Pine, Schmine... (Score:1, Interesting)
Oy the idiosy. Why are people obsessed with using pipes frivolously?
more <
or even better... more accepts file arguments
more
Everytime I see an example using a pipe when it's not necessary, I get the feeling that people are more interested in what's flashy than simple.
switch to mutt (Score:2, Interesting)
Then, I tried mutt. After a few minutes I was hooked. I now use mutt for all of my mail. I think its ability to seamlessly integrate with GPG was the biggest factor in convincing me to switch.
Why I still use pine... (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No, thanks (Score:3, Interesting)
I think by "Is not GPL", he meant "is a brain-damaged PIA license that is fundamentally intolerable to most modern Linux distributions." PINE doesn't let you distributed patched binaries, meaning that distributions can't put files in LFS-compliant places or fix bugs. So Debian, and others, don't want to mess with it, and it ends up outside the packaging system for users.
Re:Pine is EVIL!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
> Debian quite some time ago.
Ah, I was wondering what the maintainer thought about the whole situation. :-)
I'm maintaining Pine for a programming society at my university, and I encountered a fair bit of resistance of the "It's not Free enough" variety. While people may certainly choose to believe this, my reading of license indicated to me that it was permissible to do what I was doing - ie, compile it from source, perhaps even make local changes, as long as I changed the version number. I often wondered why the Debian Pine installer - which downloads the source, applies patches, compiles and makes a local .deb - disappeared. It's nice - I guess - to know that the reason is as I suspected: ideological, rather than due to any legitimate legal concerns.
Re:No, thanks (Score:2, Interesting)
No, i don't mind other open source licenses, although i prefer GPL for my projects. In my opinion there are too much 'open source' licenses that don't offer anything new (opensource.org), but, in the case of PINE, Washington University license makes pine anything but free software.
Must be tough living without apps that have other licenses, like the MIT/Athena license (XFree86). Artistic license (Perl), or Python (Python license), and others.
XFree86 license is less restrictive than GPL, you know, and no, i don't need to use obfuscated code (i.e Perl) or Python if I can avoid to
Re:Users? (Score:2, Interesting)
Basically, xfmail was adequate but ugly, TKRat was slow, KMail, Sylpheed and Evolution are promising but full of bugs, and mutt doesn't offer enough to me to be a compelling change - though I'm sure if I checked it out recently (I last looked at it two years ago) I'd have to re-think that statement.
I tried Sylpheed and Evolution quite early on in their development. Perhaps they've improved. However, I value simplicity and speed in my interface over features, and frankly Pine does most of what I want.
I use Maildir, and courier-imap. Every so often I check out a bunch of new mail readers, and I've found that using IMAP to arbitrate access to my mail is the best way to ensure it stays consistent (short of fiddling about with dummy Maildirs, of course).
I do not use Pico to edit my emails. I use joe on the console, and nedit in a GUI.
I'm pretty happy with the set-up.
Re:Still loyal (Score:3, Interesting)
Pine:
* Heavily menu-based, easier to learn
* Better colorization when reading letters (colorizes each level of replied-to text a different color)
* Most keys easier to remember
* Has a monthly sent-mail folder. You can do this in mutt, but it takes a bit of work and editing your config file.
Mutt:
* More consistent keystrokes...Pine has something like three keystrokes that mean "back out of this screen" -- Q, E, and less-than. Mutt inexplicably still uses both "q" and "i", but it's somewhat better.
* Unlike pine, you don't have to turn on something like 50 options to get reasonable functionality out of the program -- pine defaults to an extremely simple set of options, mutt to a much more powerful set.
* really, really good PGP support
* more and nicer colorization of the UI aside from the recieved mail text.
Both are fairly configurable, mutt more so. Mutt takes much more poking around and time spent to get working the way you want.
I *strongly* suggest using whichever you choose in conjunction with procmail to process your incoming mail. I sort mailing list stuff into mailing list inboxes, filter out viruses, and eat spam with procmail. A little more work to use than the more simplistic filters in a GUI email program, but very powerful, and quite a useful tool to have under the belt.
They still got threading wrong.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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):
With the threading in the new Pine 4.5, without using the threading patch (which was written by wash.edu, btw), you get:
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.