Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the my-first-love dept.
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.
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.
Re:Still useful
by
Fweeky
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When you're on the go, give PINE a call;-)
Or mutt, which doesn't have such a large history of security holes, and which has had basic features like threading for years:P
Re:Still useful
by
FFFish
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
And which is now the default email client for my university; they tossed Pine the other week because it's a security risk...
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Re:Still useful
by
Chicane-UK
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Indeed...
I implemented a Web Mail system where I work this year for students - downloaded for free from 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:)
-- "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
... watching it change is like watching evolution in motion.
Hum, not quite yet. But, it is definitely catching up.
Re:Evolution in motion
by
terkozer
·
· Score: 5, Funny
To really watch Evolution in motion peform the following steps...
obtain one (1) laptop & install favourite linux distro (debian in my case)
apt-get install evolution (or however you would install an app in your favourite distro).
make sure laptop is unplugged from electrical, ethernet sockets..
pick laptop up and hurl as far as possible across room.. (also, ignore all those wierd looks you get from co-workers)
last but not least, hope atleast somebody finds this funny..
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.
Still loyal
by
doc_traig
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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 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
-- So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
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.
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
version number management
by
jki
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Imagine that pine was first released in 1989 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).
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!
-- What is music when you despise all sound?
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
Out of pine comes pico
by
stype
·
· Score: 5, Funny
And don't forget about pico (pine composer), which has been making bad programmers worse for more years than I care to remember.
-- -Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
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.
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
Slashdot Mirror
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
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Hum, not quite yet. But, it is definitely catching up.
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.
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 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
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
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.
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
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).
Real men use cat /var/spool/mail/$USER | more and telnet $SMTP_HOST 25
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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!
What is music when you despise all sound?
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
And don't forget about pico (pine composer), which has been making bad programmers worse for more years than I care to remember.
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
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.
:)
:)
:) 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.
:) If it corresponds to a piece of spam currently in your inbox, you should see a message like "moving one filtered message to "spam.""
:)
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
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!
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
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.)
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 myAnyway, 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