I just tried Alpine the email program from Washington University. Alpine is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. All of the source needed to build Unix, Windows, and Web-based mail user agents is included. Alpine was developed by the department of Computing & Communications at the University of Washington. It’s as if it was based on Pine. Duh! It is. It is similar to Pine and it’s very easy to use. I didn’t notice any difference in the way I use it which is to say I like to use alpine for my gmail account. Here is what I’ve done. I got the source from the Washington website located here. I then compiled it with the normal configuration like so
./configure --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var --sysconfdir=/etc --disable-debug
make
and the final
make install
I’m running slackware-current as my linux distro of choice and because I have such an audience, I know that it will use all of my alloted bandwidth on westhost.com. Right?! I have produced a package with checkinstall. It it available here for your pleasure and laziness.
I also configured it to check my gmail account. The way to do that is very simple. Let me take you through the steps.
1. Type MSLA (Main> Setup> collectionLists> Add)
2. Enter something like the following but replacing the information with your gmail account
Nickname : Gmail
Server : imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=id@gmail.com
Path :
View :
3. Let’s setup SMTP to use the gmail server. You will be able to send email from you gmail account which is very useful if you have a hostname that doesn’t resolve to your computer.
SMTP Server (for sending) = smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=id@gmail.com
4. I like using alpine configuration that comes out of the box. I only modified two more setting.
[X] save-will-not-delete
pruning-rule =
(*) don’t rename, don’t delete
You can setup alpine to use a password file which could contain your gmail password but I do not recommend this as it not safe and usually not recommended. If you do want to use a password file you can go read some more here about it.
That’s it. You should be able to run Alpine with your gmail account. Nice eh? If you want to setup more advance stuff like setting up two imap account and so on, check out ii.com. It is a tremendous information source.
9 Comments
Thanks for the quick Alpine review. I went to try it out last night, but when I saw GCC in my list of unresolved dependencies, I decided not to go down that road just then.
Still, I’ve been on Pine 4.5 for a mighty long time — I look forward to moving up to Alpine.
alpine recommends that you add /novalidate-cert to the folder imap.gmail.com to avoid the certification warning
Thanks for this quick introduction - I’m currently looking into terminal-based mail clients, and this helped me get started.
FND- No problem and I’m happy that it did help you get started with Alpine. Let us know how it all worked out.
Worked out great, actually! (Though I think I’m gonna add the option suggested by chas.)
However, I’m afraid this isn’t suitable for becoming my primary e-mail client.
But it’s certainly a nice addition to Thunderbird, especially for remote access!
Thanks so much for the guide, I struggled setting up IMAP and couldn’t get the config right until I read this.
thanks for the guide. I’ve been trying to get pine working for along time and a friend told me about alpine. I’m running slackware to so I used the package you made. it worked perfectly.
No problem jpuhalski. Im glad someone is using the package.
Oh yeah!! You saved my life, i was going to uninstall alpine and give up in the search of a mail client for console, but thanks to this article i’m reading mails from console!! Thanks a lot!!
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