On Unix-like operating systems, pine is a program for accessing email and newsgroups.

Description

pine is a screen-oriented message-handling tool. In its default configuration, pine offers an intentionally limited set of functions geared toward the novice user, but it also has a growing list of optional power-user and personal-preference features. pine’s basic feature set includes:

  • Description

  • Syntax

  • Configuration

  • Files

  • Examples

  • Related commands

  • Linux commands help

  • View, Save, Export, Delete, Print, Reply and Forward messages.

  • Compose messages in a simple editor (pico) with word-wrap and a spelling checker. Messages may be postponed for later completion.

  • Full-screen selection and management of message folders.

  • Address book to keep a list of long or frequently-used addresses. Personal distribution lists may be defined. Addresses may be taken into the address book from incoming mail without retyping them.

  • New mail checking and notification occurs automatically.

  • Context-sensitive help screens.

pine supports MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), an Internet Standard for representing multipart and multimedia data in e-mail. pine allows you to save MIME objects to files, and in some cases, can also initiate the correct program for viewing the object. It uses the system’s mailcap configuration file to determine what program can process a particular MIME object type. pine’s message composer does not have multimedia capability itself, but any data file (including multimedia) can be attached to a text message and sent using MIME’s encoding rules. This allows any group of individuals with MIME-capable mail software to exchange formatted documents, spread-sheets, image files, etc., via Internet e-mail.

pine uses the “c-client” messaging API to access local and remote mail folders. This library provides a variety of low-level message-handling functions, including drivers for a variety of different mail file formats, and routines to access remote mail and news servers, using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol). Outgoing mail is usually handed off to the sendmail program but it can optionally be posted directly via SMTP.

Syntax

pine [options] [address, address]

Options

Configuration

There are several levels of pine configuration. Configuration values at a given level over-ride corresponding values at lower levels. In order of increasing precedence:

  • built-in defaults
  • system-wide pine.conf file.
  • personal .pinerc file (may be set via built-in Setup/Config menu.)
  • command-line options.
  • system-wide pine.conf.fixed file.

There is one exception to the rule that configuration values are replaced by the value of the same option in a higher-precedence file: the feature-list variable has values that are additive, but can be negated by prepending “no-” in front of an individual feature name. Unix pine also uses the following environment variables:

Files

Examples

pine

Launch pine.

pine [email protected]

Launch pine, and immediately begin composing an e-mail addressed to [email protected].

mail — Read, compose, and manage mail.pico — A simple text editor.sendmail — Send mail.