Alpine 1.00 Brings Pine Back

TreeDork alerts us that Alpine 1.00 has now been released by the University of Washington. The full source and documentation are available."On the surface, Alpine will appear strikingly similar to the Pine Message System, and it is upwards-compatible for existing Pine users. Alpine is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The source code has been reorganized from the ground up to separate the user interface code from the underlying email engine itself. All of the source needed to build Unix, Windows, and Web-based mail user agents is included.

Comments

Re:Why bother

[FireFury03]

Why bother when you can use gmail or any one of a number of excellent webmail clients.

6 very important reasons spring to mind:

1. WebMail is *really* slow compared to PINE
2. FireFox with a webmail system in it takes up many times the screen space
3. I don't especially want to trust a third party with my private data
4. I don't want my mail to be inaccessible when some 3rd party web mail server goes tits-up
5. If I run my own MTA I can do some useful automated stuff with things like procmail
6. I happen to like the interface

I'm sure I could think of plenty of other reasons if pushed. Asking "why bother?" on the assumption that everyone's requirements must be identical to yours is pretty arrogant...

Re:Inertia?

[apathy maybe]

I don't know if vi or vim has a mail client (though I do sometimes use it to edit text), but your comment reminds me of an old quote, which I can't just recall exactly, about programs expanding until they have a mail client... "All programs expand until they can read mail..." perhaps?

Meh, I'm just as happy using mutt if I have to check my email without a GUI, and if I'm doing that it almost always means that I have access to webmail as well ('cause I'd be using SSH to use mutt...).

Re:Why bother

[morgan_greywolf]

I can think of some more:

1. Offline access to your mail (not everyone has an 'always on connection'
2. Sync with your PDA/Phone/Mobile computing device
3. Good mail filtering (gmail's search and tags are okay, but they're not like real filtering)
4. Extra spam protection above and beyond what gmail offers
5. Better handling of attachments
6. Pine/Alpine, unlike GUI clients, will work well on a console. (What do you do if X keeps crashing and you need to e-mail someone to get help?)
7. Works over ssh/telnet

Need I go on? Or should I just say everyone has different requirements like the parent did?

It is easier

[Kludge]

Mut just is not nearly as easy to use as pine/alpine is. I tried mutt once, it went like this:

Q:How do I get mutt to send mail directly to my ISP's SMTP server?
A:Mutt is a mail user agent not a mail transfer agent

Q: How do I get mutt to read mail from my IMAP mailbox?
A:Mutt is a mail user agent not a mail transfer agent

Q: How do I get mutt to keep an address book?
A: Use this extra 3rd party perl script, or this 3rd party perl script or ...

Re:It is easier

[hackstraw]

Q: How do I get mutt to keep an address book?
A: Use this extra 3rd party perl script, or this 3rd party perl script or ...

Mutt has an addressbook or aliases I believe they call it, works with tab completion.

Mutt even complies with some obscure RFC rule for email where you can resend a mail. I don't know of too many mailers that can do that. Its ESC-e if you care.

Also, mutt can use vim as your editor, which I use all the time anyway, so it keeps my life more consistant than learning different editors.

Um... Where pine go?

[jchawk]

Not to ask the obvious question but where did pine ever go?

I've been using pine for as long as I've had email. Probably for the same reasons everyone else is. It does exactly what I need. I'm lazy. And it's worked for the past 10+ years.

So I'm not sure that pine ever went anywhere to begin with. :-P

Licence Fixed At Last

[ajs318]

It's good that they've fixed the licence at last. The old PINE licence was a problem for distributions; getting it to work the way a particular distro wanted required modifying it, which -- for .rpm / .deb based distributions with pre-compiled packages -- was against the strictest interpretation of the terms. UW always tended to turn a blind eye to this (even hosting modified RPMs), but this isn't something you should ever rely on.

Re:Why bother

[kv9]

I have a question for you: why do you advocate mediocrity? this is slashdot after all, we should be appreciating quality things.

I use pine, GMail and Opera mail and find them all somewhat useful.

pine is good at firing up a quick email or checking something fast because I always have a few terminals open.

Opera mail is my main client because it's fast, has a great interface and does not keep all the emails in one bigass file, which makes me sleep better at night and allows me to just browse/search the filesystem for a particular message.

and GMail is good for those times when I'm not at work or home and I don't have access to my usual machines. but it's slow as shit (the basic HTML interface is OK, but I can't find a way to make it default, I always have to switch to it) and generally awkward to work with. yes, with the introduction of SMTP things are a lot better because of the hefty amount of space it provides. and sane access for once.

so yeah, there's lots of way to read your email but web clients are the "best" only if you have no idea how good the alternatives are. webmail is just a necessary evil. feel free to disagree, but quality != popularity.

Re:It's alright ...

[Just some bastard]

Seriously, if you need a console mail client you are either living in the 1970s or using mail for things that have been rendered obsolete by modern web and OS development. Either way you are outdated.

When and how exactly did modern web and OS development render text obsolete?