PC Pine

Pine is a mature, robust, reliable, secure, feature-rich program for reading email and newsgroups available from the University of Washington. Most Unix users are familiar with pine, and most Windows users aren't even aware that a Windows version exists. The usual complaints about pine are that it can't view attachments or web URLs; both of these are simply false. One of the biggest advantages of pine is that it requires real effort to get infected by a virus if you use it.

Out of the box, the Unix versions of pine are configured for reading locally delivered email and archive folders and for sending mail using a local MTA (such as /usr/bin/sendmail -bs). However, this is not the only way that pine can be used. In fact, on the Physics Department's Linux computers we have configured system-wide defaults so that pine will run as an IMAP client using a remote SMTP server with authentification, and both are encrypted using SSL. If you are using pine on one of the computers we maintain, then you should not have to change any settings to access your email.

The first time you launch PC-Pine, it will not find its configuration file and you will be greeted with the following dialog box

It really doesn't matter whether you store your configuration file on the IMAP server or locally on the client, but by choosing the server you can use the same configuration file from multiple clients which is probably a good thing. So fill in the fields as shown in the picture (as usual substituting your real username for "username"), and then you will be prompted for your password. Once you've succesfully logged in, you will get several complaints from pine, but eventually you should be able to get to the main menu screen.

Basic configuration

The key to using pine as an IMAP client is how you configure the 'inbox-path'. From the main menu screen press S for "Setup" and C for "Config". The first five configuration options are the important ones. They should be set to

personal-name = whatever you call yourself
user-domain = physics.harvard.edu
smtp-server = physics.harvard.edu/user=username
nntp-server = news.fas.harvard.edu (or skip it if you don't read news groups).
inbox-path = {physics.harvard.edu/ssl/user=username}INBOX
(N.B. modern versions of pine will ask you to specifiy the incoming server "physics.harvard.edu/ssl/user=username" and then the inbox path "INBOX" separately.) And those are all of the crucial settings. After that, you should be able to read your email as if you were on Unix running pine, except that all those annoying Word document attachments will be much less annoying.

How to copy the configuration from your Unix pine to PC-pine:

Log in to login.physics.harvard.edu (using SSH or something). Run Unix pine and choose

(S) for Setup
(Z) for RemoteConfigSetup
You will be prompted to convert the addressbook to a remote address book, the signature file to a literal signature, and the configuration to a remote configuration. In all cases, the defaults are fine, and when prompted for a server name the answer is "physics.harvard.edu/ssl/user=username".