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Alpine 1.00 Brings Pine Back

Posted by Soulskill on from the old-friend-new-face dept.

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.

4 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why bother by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    --
    http://blog.nexusuk.org
  2. Re:Inertia? by apathy+maybe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...).

    --
    I wank in the shower.
  3. Re:Why bother by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?
    --
    My blog
  4. It is easier by Kludge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 ...