pine

Section: User Commands (1)
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NAME

pine - read and send electronic mail with an easy user interface  

SYNTAX

pine [-i] [-nr] [-r] [-k] [-z] [-h] [-f folder ] [-d debug-level ] [-conf] [ address ] [-sort order ]

pinef [-i] [-nr] [-r] [-z] [-h] [-f folder ] [-d debug-level ] [-conf] [ address ] [-sort order ]  

DESCRIPTION

Pine is a mail user agent designed primarily for novice users, though it's full featured enough for processing large amounts of mail. It's completely interactive and runs on 80x24 or larger terminals making use of the full screen. Some of the design principles were to keep things simple and straight forward with a limited number of well selected features; to provide the user with a menu to pick commands from; to be forgiving of mistakes so the user can learn while doing without fear of disaster and to provide immediate feedback to the user for each command. Pine has it's own tightly integrated pager for scrolling though incoming messages and it's own editor for composing messages.

Pine uses the c-client library to access mail files. The c-client acts as a switch between different mail file formats/drivers. Currently it understands Berkeley mail files, Tenex mail files, the IMAP2 protocol and NetNews. IMAP2 is the Interactive Mail Access Protocol described in RFC 1176. With an IMAP server such as imapd running on a central host users can access their e-mail from many different hosts on the network without having to log into the central host.

Outgoing mail is usually handed off to sendmail, but it can be post directly via SMTP when configured to do so in the .pinerc file or the global pine.conf file. (SMTP is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol defined in RFC-822).

Most recently Pine supports MIME, The Multipart Internet Mail Extensions defined in RFC-1341. This allows Pine to send and receive multipart and multimedia e-mail. Pine meets the minimal MIME compliance requirements and is able to view most parts of any received MIME message and to save all parts to files, whatever their format. On the composing side, the focus of the MIME implementation has been to allow users to attach files to messages so they can transfer arbitrary messages, rather than on creating true multi-media e-mail with graphics and sounds. This is in preparation for a PC-DOS version of Pine to allow users to mail spread sheets and other such files back and forth. Pine will recognize a few of the multimedia formats such as GIF files. When they are attached they are tagged as being images and if Pine is running on an X-terminal it will call xloadimage to display them.

The command line options are:

-z
Enable ^Z or SIGTSTP so pine may be suspended.
-f folder
Open named folder on start up. The folder names are paths relative to the user mail directory
-d debug-level
Debugging will be output to the .pine-debugX file at level debug-level (0-9)
-conf
Produce a sample/fresh copy of the system pine configuration file on the standard output. This is distinct from the per user .pinerc file.
address
Send mail to address. This will cause Pine to go directly into the message composer.
-k
Use function keys for commands. This is the same as pinef.
-r
Go into restricted demo mode. Pine will only send mail to the itself and functions like save and export are restricted.
-i
Bypass main menu and go directly into the index.
-h
Print out help on the possible flags and arguments that can be give in Pine
-nr
Go into read-only, anonymous news mode. Anonymous login will be made to the IMAP server; the menus and command are arranged for displaying news; only commands sensible in anonymous mode are enabled; no message status is shown.
-sort order
Sort the folder in one of the following orders: arrival, subject, from, date, size or reverse. Arrival order is the default. Any sort may be reversed by adding /reverse to it.

This documentation is not intended to be complete. The help screens in Pine constitute the main documentation. There are also some technical notes with the source. A general overview of features includes:

View, save, export, delete, print, reply and forward incoming mail.
Compose message in a simple editor with word wrap and spelling checker. A message under composition may be temporarily postponed while another is composed or postponed.
Full screen selection and management of mail folders
Address book to keep a list of long or frequently used addressed. Distribution lists are available and may refer to other lists or entries as many levels deep as desired. Address book entries can be taken from incoming mail without retyping them.
New mail checking and notification occurs automatically every thirty seconds
On line context sensitive help screens.
Show disk space used by mail folders, and free space on the disk or in quota.

The current version of Pine is 3.0.  

FILES

/usr/spool/mail/xxxx    Folder for incoming mail

~/.address_book           Ascii address book file

~/mail                    Directory of mail folders

~/.pine-debugx            Diagnostic log for debugging

~/.pinerc                 The user pine configuration file

/usr/local/lib/pine.info  Local pointer to system administrator

/usr/local/lib/pine.conf  System wide pine configuration file

/tmp/.\usr\spool\mail\xxxxRead/write per folder/mailbox lock files
 

SEE ALSO

pico(1), binmail(1), aliases(5), mailaddr(7), sendmail(8), spell(1), imapd(8)  

AUTHORS

Laurence Lundblade, Mike Seibel, and Mark Crispin, with contributions on the design from many others

 

Index

NAME
SYNTAX
DESCRIPTION
FILES
SEE ALSO
AUTHORS
This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 06:55:15 GMT, May 19, 2025