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PINE Releases 4.50

wasaty writes "Yesterday new PINE came out. Main new feature is (at last!) threading support. Look here for a full list of changes." Ah, my first "real" e-mail program; watching it change is like watching evolution in motion.

10 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Don't use it. by fahrvergnugen · · Score: 5, Informative
    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?

    --
    Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
  2. License Issues w/ Pine by irregular_hero · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pine is a really nice mail app, for sure. But I still think it has one of the quirkiest licenses 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.

  3. Re:Still useful by coryboehne · · Score: 4, Informative

    Duh, damn programmer mindset getting me into trouble again....

    Now that I look at it again I realize that they don't mean the kind of threading I was thinking about, they mean theading as in nesting.... D'Oh!

    Dearest Moderators: This is not flamebait, I am replying to myself to acknoledge that I made a stupid mistake.... thank you.

  4. I would say by emag · · Score: 4, Informative

    ..."because it's slow and messy"...

    Pine was nice 10 years ago, easier to figure out (for me) than elm, nicer than mail and Mail. But, well, changes take a damned long time coming, and some things (like newsgroup support) seemed to be added for "gee whiz" reasons before things that make reading large mailing lists useful (like threading).

    As others have said, most everyone with patience to learn something else has moved on. Most of the people I know have moved on to mutt. And yes, someone's pointed out to me the default keybindings match elm. I guess as you grow and learn . . .

    --
    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
  5. Re:Pine is EVIL!!! by Servo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not entirely. I used to maintain PINE for Debian quite some time ago.

    Because it wasn't entirely "free as in speech", it was required to go into the non-free section. Unless they've drastically changed the license since I last paid any attention to it, it required:

    1) Modified versions were required to be designated with a L (iirc) after the version number to signal they had been changed before compiling.

    2) You are not allowed to sell the binaries, or distribute them on a "for sale" media.

    3) Permission is required before distributing the binaries.

    The big deal with Debian was that it could not be included in the normal section because of #2, and I think the powers that be at the time were pissed off at #3 as well. At the time I was managing PINE for Debian, practically all of the other distro's included a compiled version of PINE. It pissed me off because the controlling group within Debian didn't want to work out a deal with UW to allow Pine to be distributed as a normal package within Debian.

    FYI, this was back when Bruce Peren's had his weekly temper tantrums and threaten to go work for Redhat instead.

    --
    A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
  6. Threading support by rsidd · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  7. Fix it yourself (was Re:Does it..) by CoolVibe · · Score: 4, Informative
    In your login script do:

    stty sane
    stty erase ^H
    stty erase ^\?

    It's not a bug in pine, it's a bug in your termcap database.

  8. spam filters in PINE: how to add them :) by timothy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    --
    jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
  9. Re:IMAP in Pine by Charles+Dodgeson · · Score: 5, Informative
    How does Pine's IMAP client implementation compare to Mutt's?

    Pine is IMAP. For a very long time, other clients (including mutt) just treated IMAP as a form of POP. Pine, on the other hand, did IMAP before it did POP. (A principle pine developer is also a principle force behind IMAP.)

    I've been thinking of setting up my own IMAP server....
    Look at the UW IMAP server. The chief complaint about it is that it is be slow and a memory hog for large mail boxes. But that is only true if you use the unix/mbox mail box format. If you use the recommend mbx format, access is quick, you can have multiple sessions open to the same mailbox (with this, I get around the "single view" problem of pine, by running multiple instances. I also store my .pinerc on an IMAP server as well.)

    Anyway, I'm obviously a pine fan (and was a tester for this release. I haven't yet installed 4.50, so I'm still running 4.49.9999).

    --
    Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
  10. Re:Still useful by Combuchan · · Score: 4, Informative

    If I'm ever trapped at the library or foreign language lab here at my local community college and have to accomplish something more productive than studying or listening to the instructor, I always download PuTTY, a free Win32 SSH client.

    The good thing about PuTTY is that the downloable .EXE is the entire program. There's no installer and thus the application can be run from even the most locked down of machines with little difficulty.

    PuTTY is also super-stable (has never crashed on me, and Notepad can't even say that) and it's GPL'd. Go PuTTY!

    --
    "[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater