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

I guess I still have to ask

[ByOhTek]

Is Alpine still not elm?

Re:I guess I still have to ask

[dosowski]

Alpine's Like Pine: It's Not Elm

Re:I guess I still have to ask

[Hoplite3]

That's awesome! But I think they might have intended it to be

Apache License PINE

Of course, since they don't spell it out, we're free to make it whatever we want...

Re:Why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

You suggested webmail to a pine user? Prepare to be flogged!

The real question is "Why bother when you can use mutt?"

Glad I wore my asbestos boxers today.

Alpine? Pine?

[morgan_greywolf]

Why, in my day, we just had mail. That was it. Just mail. No fancy HTML support, fonts or colors, no menus. Just commands. And we liked it that way!

You kids and your newfangled elm, pine, alpine, whatever...now you kids get offa my lawn!

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?

Re:Alpine? Pine?

[Guinness2702]

telnet slashdot.org 25
HELO guinness.internet.outthere
MAIL FROM: guinness2702@slashdot.org
RCPT TO: morgan_greywolf@slashdot.org
DATA
From: Guinness2702
To morgan_greywolf
Subject: Re: Alpine? Pine?

You got to use mail? Luxury! Luxury, I tell's you.
Back in my day, all we got was a telnet client and a dns query tool
Bah, kids don't know they're born these days.
.

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

[billcopc]

So what the heck is mutt, then ? 'ed' with a new name ?

Re:It is easier

[snoyberg]

No, silly. Ed is the standard editor

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.

Re:It is easier

[drew]

Then it must have been an awful long time ago. I used mutt from about '99-'01, and while the first question is accurate, Mutt had great support for IMAP and as far as I recall, a decent address book. The SMTP thing wasn't that big a deal to me, at least - I only used it on Linux, where it was trivially easy to set Postfix to route outgoing email though my ISP. I've actually considered going back to Mutt from time to time, but I have to use Outlook at work, and I don't get enough email at my personal account to be worth it.

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: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).

Re:It is easier

[Trinn]

So basically.....you want labels :-P (its just funny to see someone want something that so many people don't see the point of)

Re:Alpine? Pine?

[morgan_greywolf]

You had DNS?!

Lucky.

We just had a really huge, sloppily-maintained copy of /etc/hosts on each systems.

Re:Why bother

[Average]

My reason for Pine (or mutt or such) as an option (as well as a personal webmail install and using Tbird most of the time):

Nothing... absolutely nothing works as well at 28.8k. This road warrior ends up doing dial-up on a not-infrequent basis, even today.

Re:Alpine? Pine?

[Guinness2702]

Hmm, missed an opportunity then. Okay, here goes

*sharp intake of breath*

Why when I was young all we got was a PDP-11 with a card puncher with cards that we had to give to the office boy who'd get on his bike, take to the cards and the one card reader the company had to the other office where they'd read them in reply to the message and the give the cards with the replay, and the reader back to the boy who'd bring the reply back to our office!

Re:Pine vs. mutt?

[Just some bastard]

I did switch to mutt a few years back (along with all the cool kids), after 2-3 months I switched back. Pine is available, requires minimal configuration and works the same on every box I have access to.

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

Re:Um... Where pine go?

[Professor_UNIX]

The old Pine license precluded it from being included in binary format in any distributions unless they chose to violate the license. Alpine doesn't have that problem. I don't know why this is particularly news though since I've been using Alpine on my Ubuntu Feisty box since May.

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

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Also it lets you compose in your favorite editor easily.

Which would of course be Emacs. /me runs for cover

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail does have more functionality, but I can access PINE from everywhere using PuTTY (which I keep on a flash drive) or a web emulator.

Re:Inertia?

[vyrus128]

"All programs attempt to expand until they can read mail. Those that can't are replaced by those that can." -- Jamie Zawinzki

Re:It's alright ...

[Confessed Geek]

Because its one of fastest most effective mail clients out there?

Pine is awesome because anytime you have an SSH client, you have your mail. You also get to skip most spam, html crap in email, a easy text based interface, and no need for a gui.

The only thing annoying about it was its license, now Alpine has all that minimalistic goodness and is under the Apache license.

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.

Name change

[kvap]

> Why Alpine Message System (AMS)?

Because Pine Message System sounded too whiney :)

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?

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.

And of course...

[Noryungi]

Pine = Program for Internet News and Email
Pine = Pine Is Not Elm
Alpine = Apache Licensed Pine

Just so you know... :-)

Who needs Pine ...

[VeteranNoob]

... when there is a venerable email client installed by default in almost every O/S.

Yes, I'm speaking of telnet.

If god wanted you to use a GUI, he wouldn't have invented ASCII!

He's not dead ....

[Mean Variance]

He's pining for the fjords.

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.

You can lose the apostrophes, too

[JavaRob]

Alpine's Like Pine: It's Not Elm Alpine, Like Pine, Is Not Elm

Re: attachments and search

[Beetle B.]

Take attachments. I'm running pine over ssh, There's your problem.