Configuring alpine
Alpine
is a text-only screen-based mail program. (The previous version was called
pine
. This version is still present on some older systems at Nevis. If the
alpine
command doesn't work, try
pine
.) It was designed by the University of Washington to have a large set of features, and yet be easy for novices to use.
Alpine
displays a list of your available options at the bottom of the screen, along with the keypresses to invoke them, so you always know what you're able to do. You can learn about
alpine
from within the program; just type
alpine
to run the program, and type
?
whenever you need help.
Alpine
is full-featured mail program, including mail aliases (which are called address books), folders for organizing mail messages, and full support for MIME enclosures. Since it is text-based, it can be run from remote computer systems via
ssh
, and the user interface will be the same as if you were running it on a terminal at Nevis.
Alpine
supports the IMAP protocol, and you can use it to see mail on remote computer systems that run IMAP. It's quicker to specifically identify yourself as a particular user who's reading your mail using the IMAP server. To do this, from the
alpine
main menu type "S", then "C", then move the cursor down to the
inbox path
option, and type:
{mail.nevis.columbia.edu/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=????}inbox
...where
????
should be replaced by your account name. Note the use of curly brackets (they're
not parentheses).
If you use the above method, you'll have to type in your password every time you start up
alpine
.
This web page
describes how to avoid this.
On many systems,
alpine
switches the colors in the display window to white text on a black background. If you find this annoying, you use this command before running
Alpine
:
setenv TERM vt100
Note: if you do this, you may lose some of the color highlighting in text-based displays such as
man
pages and in
emacs -nw
. Rather than placing this command in your
~/.mycshrc
file, you may wish to start a special xterm just for reading mail via
alpine
, with the terminal type preset to vt100:
xterm -tn vt100
...or use a sub-shell:
(setenv TERM vt100; alpine)
A minor disadvantage of
alpine
is it uses
pico
as its default editor for composing messages.
Pico
is a full-featured editor, but it does not enable a backup buffer; if you experience an error while composing a message you can lose your work.
You can configure
alpine
to use
emacs
to compose mail messages instead. To do this, from the
Alpine
main menu type "S", then "C", then move the cursor down to the editor option, and change it to
emacs -nw
. You can also use
vi
if you wish. Both of these editors create backup files, so if you experience a problem after you've spent an hour composing a message, you have a chance to recover it.