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

Anyone know if it supports S/MIME?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Pine as my primary e-mail client for years but in modern times it started to seriously lack important features like real S/MIME support. Anyone know if this has been added yet? There doesn't appear to be any documentation on the site.

I love the webmail responses, LOL. Yeah, you guys just keep trusting some 3rd party to handle your private mail. What could possibly go wrong?

Why?

[seebs]

PINE was one of the most atrociously-written programs I have ever seen. It was built by people who absolutely failed to understand UNIX, at any level. It used to fail on big-endian systems that used 64-bit file offsets, because rather than using the STANDARD SYSTEM HEADERS, it manually misdefined every UNIX system call itself. Why? Because one of the programmers once saw a system, somewhere, where he claimed was wrong, so they made a consistent practice of, by default, including their own local definitions INSTEAD OF the standard system ones, except on a very few platforms that had to be specially identified.

The whole program is like that. It's full of cargo cult nonsense, attempts to reinvent other languages in C, and so on.

If you like the interface, the thing to do would be to start from scratch and write a program with that interface, but to do it competently, using programmers who have some basic understanding of C. If you start from the PINE base, you are doomed.

Re: attachments and search

[wwwrench]

I use pine and I love it -- it's far faster than webmail or thunderbird. But the list you mention contain items which make me sometimes want to switch to another client.

Take attachments. I'm running pine over ssh, and almost all the time, I can't just view the attachment by clicking on it. I have to save it, then scp it over, then open it. A pain in the ass.

Then there is the lack of search functionality. This is a bit of a killer. Sure I can run some script to search the files, but it is not very convenient. And finally, I would like to be able to tag an email in multiple ways, rather than just save it into a particular file.

Perhaps there is a way to do these things, in which case, please let me know, but otherwise, I will always use pine with a bit of gmail-envy.

Re:It is easier

[value_added]

I tried mutt once, it went like this:

Allow me to fix that for you:

I once tried to use mutt to do a number of things an email user agent has no business doing, and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.

If it helps, recent versions of mutt do offer SMTP, IMAP, POP (and even NNTP) support. While occasionaly useful, the additions should placate the complaints of folks who don't understand *nix, can't get past the basics, or otherwise have a desire to see sendmail, mail, fetchmail, procmail, formail, sed, Perl, and spamassassin, along with authentication and encryption (ldap thrown in for good measure), each rewritten into a single, all-singing, all-dancing program.

The mutt mailing list consists almost entirely of friendly, informed, and detailed answers to questions from people of all skill levels, so I think your original comment is unfair and as it disingenuous, particularly for someone who may interested in trying mutt.

For everyone else, the notion that "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." remains both valid and funny, just as it did in 1995 when it was first coined. And for the record, I can say that I was once upon a time a Pine user, but only with the same level of uncomfortable embarassment I feel when recalling being initially impressed by the features offered by Outlook and Exchange.

Re: attachments and search

[paulproteus]

I understand what you mean about Gmail envy. I've been using PINE since 1999, before this Gee-mail fad started, but everyone around me uses a web browser for email and claims to love it.

PINE is best used when coupled with a good IMAP server. The best Free Software IMAP server seems to be Dovecot these days, and includes indexed (read: "FAST") full-text search in the 1.1 beta releases.

What I do is enable full-text indexing on my email with Dovecot, and then you can use PINE's regular ; (Select) operator to search on all text, and bam - you get results practically instantly.

Re:It is easier

[Beetle B.]

The mutt mailing list consists almost entirely of friendly, informed, and detailed answers to questions from people of all skill levels, so I think your original comment is unfair and as it disingenuous, particularly for someone who may interested in trying mutt. Actually, it's not. While I never was on the mailing list, I used to post quite a bit on the USENET newsgroup. And there was (perhaps still is) one expert user who would say those exact things in a very condescending manner to newbies. I'm sure he single-handedly drove many people away from Mutt.

I'm a Mutt user. My biggest complaint is that I can't save outgoing emails to more than one folder based on the list of recipients. I've known others on the USENET newsgroup whine about this, as well. Is this a feature Pine/Alpine has?

In fact, out of curiosity, what does Pine/Alpine have that Mutt doesn't and vice versa? (Let's ignore interface issues).