Pine is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. Pine was developed by Computing & Communications at the University of Washington. Though originally designed for inexperienced email users, Pine has evolved to support many advanced features, and an ever-growing number of configuration and personal-preference options. Pine is available for Unix as well as for personal computers running a Microsoft operating system (PC-Pine). [1]
With Windows, there are essentially two versions of Pine that you may run. The first is PC-Pine. This is available for download from the University of Washington. You may also run the version of Pine that is intended for Unix systems. To do this, you must run Cygwin. Installing Cygwin is beyond the scope of this document except to say that when installing Cygwin, you have the opportunity to install Pine.
Installing Pine is not difficult, but configuring it may be a bit confusing.
When Pine starts, you are presented with an introduction screen. Press E to move beyond this screen to the Main Menu.
At the Main Menu press S for Setup. Press C for Config to set up Pine.
This screen varies a bit depending upon which version of Pine you have installed. For each option, you may press ? to get information about it and E to exit help and return to the configuration page.
We will focus on the first options presented on this screen. The others may remain as defaults. For each option, press C to Change the value.
personal-name
Enter your name or nickname
user-domain
Enter your domain name. For example, my site is
http://www.subterrane.com. For this value, I entered
subterrane.com
smtp-server
Enter mail.yourdomain.com. You may need to enter your user name as
well. In Pine, this is done with /user= and your
username. For example: mail.foo.com/user=myusername
inbox-path
At Dreamhost, your Inbox path is in the folder Inbox. In Pine, you
must indicate the server, your username, and the folder. The server
and user name are contained in curly braces ({}). For
example: {mail.foo.com/user=myusername}Inbox
default-fcc
The other folders are set up in the same manner, with the Inbox as
the root of the path. In this example, I will set my default fcc
(forward carbon copy) to my Sent mail folder. This way, I can keep a
copy of every message I send. Example:
{mail.foo.com/user=myusername}Inbox.Sent
This should be sufficient to get you working with Pine. Press E to exit setup and confirm your changes. You may need to restart Pine and enter your password to open your Inbox. Return to the Main Menu and press L to see a list of folders. Select your Inbox. You should see your mail!
Deleted mail is not immediately removed. It is marked deleted and must be eXpunged before it is removed. Messages marked as deleted may be unmarked with the U key. You may get help at any time my pressing the ? key. Often, you will be able to see more commands by pressing the O key. Pine uses Pico as its message editor. If you installed Cygwin, you may install and use Pico as a regular text editor from the command line or you can install and use a clone of Pico called Nano.
Although Pine may not look as polished as other email clients specifically written for Windows, it is incredibly stable and virtually bug free. While other clients suffer from macro viruses and embedded HTML tricks and exploits, Pine does not. Pine does not abstract you from the message text and easily allows you to view message headers (press the H key).
Pine is even available via your Dreamhost shell account
Another Dreamhost user, also named Will, made the following suggestions:
[1]: http://www.washington.edu/pine/