Alpine Messaging System, the alternative to Pine.

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.

alpine-1.00-i386-1.tgz

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.