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: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

[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: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

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Also it lets you compose in your favorite editor easily.

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

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.

Name change

[kvap]

> Why Alpine Message System (AMS)?

Because Pine Message System sounded too whiney :)

And of course...

[Noryungi]

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

Just so you know... :-)