Episode: 203
Title: HPR0203: Alpine: How to
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0203/hpr0203.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 13:44:22

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Let's get started.
I'm recording this not in my traditional environment, so if you hear servers in the background
or anything humming, that is because I'm in my office right now, having been made homeless
for a good week while I'm transitioning from one apartment to another.
So I apologize for sound quality if it is suffering.
And since Dave Yates and his latest episode decided to start a new segment called What
Is in My Bag, an exciting new segment, I'm going to get that out of the way right now.
What is in my bag is all my personal belongings, clothes, computers, and that's all I own.
So there you go.
Okay, so this episode is going to be about setting up pine or alpine to work with IMAP specifically,
although a lot of this will apply if you're just doing it with a regular pop account as
well.
So first of all, the obligatory, what is pine?
Well, WebsterStictionary defines pine as an email client.
It's a text or a command line based email client.
And it was developed, I think, by the University of Washington.
You can get all this information on the inner web, just Google, pine, email client, you'll
get all the history about it.
It's fairly well time honored and a lot of people used it back in the days when they were
on whatever version of the internet existed on the campuses at universities and stuff
like that.
And this will help you understand the way that pine works.
So it's kind of good to imagine, you know, a university having whatever kind of network
they had, you know, you would get your user account name and you could sign in and you
could go into pine and, you know, it's the traditional multi-user system, right?
So fairly recently, we'll come back to that.
Fairly recently, pine was discontinued, has been around for a while, you know, they kind
of stopped developing on it.
You can still use it, but you could also opt to use the current developed program called
Alpine, ALPIN, and I don't know if these are acronyms or anything or if they're just
catching names, but Alpine is the, is the latest version of this kind of set up.
And in fact, if you launch, if you have both on your system and you launch them both,
you will not be able to tell them the part really, I mean, they're exactly the same in
look and feel.
It's just Alpine has some cool features like tab to completion.
So if you've got like a couple of addresses in your address book, you go to enter the name,
you hit tab and it completes it for you.
It's quite nice.
So I'm going to probably end up saying pine and Alpine, just assume I'm talking about
the same thing and basically you can assume that I'm talking about either pine or Alpine.
I'm not going to give you the URLs for either of these because typically what you'll be
able to do, if you're running Linux is just install it from your repo, if your repo
doesn't have it, Google for pine or Alpine email client and you will find the link to
it.
They're both on university websites and they're both very easy to download and as a matter
of fact, they're both really easy to compile Alpine, I was able to compile on basically
every system I had, Slackware, Mandriva, I didn't try it on Fedora and OS 10.
So there were really easy compiles, I think for OS 10 you have to set a couple of flags
like enable OS 10 binaries or something like that.
It's on their website.
It's just like one little thing that you have to pass while you're compiling or two
actually two little options but it's really easy and it works really well.
Okay, I know you're saying, well, why do I want to use Alpine Clat 2?
Answer is you probably don't.
You probably want your thunderbirds and your evolutions and your other email clients that
have all the fancy colors and the drag and dropping and stuff like that.
However, there are two things that you might actually might want to use Alpine.
Number one is if you actually do find yourself in a terminal or in a console a lot during
the day, it's just a bother to go back out to the GUI.
Like however you escape the console, sometimes it's just too much, you're just always flipping
over to the GUI and that just kind of gets bothersome after a while.
So you might want to do it for that reason.
Number two, you might want to use it simply to become familiar with a terminal based email
clients.
It's kind of a cool skill to have so it's kind of fun to teach yourself that.
I mean, there's not a whole lot to learn at this point about the GUI email clients,
right?
You've got that down probably.
So it is kind of fun to learn something new and the third one is because, you know,
the whole myth of it being faster, you know, the terminal.
It's just all text so fast, oh, so great.
So you can do it for that reason too if you're finding that the GUI based applications
is just horribly slow.
Not that I've actually had any problem with GUI based email clients being slow lately,
but in theory, you know, it could happen, it could be a problem for you.
So we've installed it, we've decided we want to use it great.
Let's launch it.
So obviously you go out to a console or a terminal, type in pine or alpine.
What I did was I just made an alias in my bash profile and made an alias so that if
I do type in pine, which I was used to, then it would just launch alpine anyway.
So if you need to find out where alpine is, you can type in which alpine, W-H-I-C-H
space alpine, that will tell you, like, where is it is, like, slash user slash bin slash
alpine, whatever.
So once you're there, you'll see a main menu.
This is the main menu you're going to see a lot because it's the first screen you see
anytime you launch alpine.
And it's got a couple of different options.
The first of which we will be going into is setup.
So you hit S as in setup, and then you hit C as in config.
This is a ridiculously long config file.
This thing, the main menu base, it's very easy to navigate, but it's just really, really
long.
It has every option you could possibly want.
Now that is bonus reason number four that you might want to use pine or alpine.
You might want to look at this program because if you at all have the occasion or the need
with a desire to modify a lot of the headers that go out on an email, I think you might
find it fairly difficult to do that on a lot of the GUI apps.
But on pine, you've got a lot of control over what exactly is displayed in the header
files of the email.
Obviously, that's not going to include things like originating IP address and what IP
addresses it goes through along the path.
But if you need to modify a lot of the little minute details that some people will look
in the header files for, pine gives you access to all that kind of stuff.
So the first field there is personal name.
That's the field that is going to be visible in a person's inbox.
Like when it says from Clat 2, or from Clat 2 last name, whatever, but whatever you want
to say there, that's what you're going to put in personal name.
User domain.
I know you're thinking, well, so the domain is one thing, and my personal name is another
thing.
Where's the rest of it?
Like, where's the user name?
You know, where's the thing that my email provider has as my login name?
Well, that's going to be in a different menu, and it's a little bit of a setup in this
different menu that you have to do like a reply to option, and we'll do that in a little
while.
So basically, the user domain is going to be whoever your provider is, whether it's
like Gmail.com, for instance, or like if you're at a company, let's say I work at Hacker
Public Radio, right?
Maybe they have an IMAP server setup.
So it would be personal name, Clat 2, user domain, HackerPublicRadio.org, SMTP server.
Again, I'm going to just say that this is an IMAP setup because that's more complicated
than pop.
If this is pop, you probably, I mean, if you've ever set up an email client before you
just do the same thing, it's really, really simple.
SMTP-server, let's just say it is relay.hackerpublicradio.com.
The inbox path, you can leave that, no, you can't leave that as the default for IMAP.
Actually, you have to change that.
So what that's going to be, and again, this obviously, this always depends on how the
system admin of this company would have it set up, but I'll do an example.
So inbox path, you can hit enter, and it'll take you into that field, and you can type
in, for instance, curly bracket, let's say mail.hackerpublicradio.org slash user equals.
So it's the word user, usr equals, and then your actual user name that you're going to
use to sign in to the email account.
So if my user name was actually, let's say, not Clat 2, then I would need to put that
in there, right?
So my personal name that I want people to see, that can be anything I want.
It can be Clat 2, it can be hacker, public radio host, it can be anything.
But the user name needs to be what you sign in for, like if you were going to go to the
web-based interface or something like that, that's going to be your user name.
So that's going to be very specific.
That's the account that you have with that email provider.
So user equals, let's say, not Clat 2, and then slash, now if they're doing SSL and stuff
like that, and you don't have the key files that you need for this to all happen very
smoothly, you will need to put no validate-sert.
And then you can close the curly brackets and then type in inbox, and I did it all on
caps and it works.
So that is basically telling Pine or Alpine, that your inbox does not exist on your computer,
it exists on the server.
You've got a lot of different folders that you can set up.
You've got incoming archive folders, you've got prune folders, you've got a default
FCC, which is file-carbon copy, which is sort of your sent folder basically.
So you can do that again, curly bracket, mail.hackupradarorg slash user equals, not Clat 2 slash.
And again, if there's SSL stuff going on here, because I don't have the SSL files that
I need for it to happen automatically, I had to put slash TLS, that's tango, L's, and
L's, and S's and set up slash, no validate-sert, and then close curly bracket and in the
word sent.
And again, I used to capital S, lowercase ENT, I don't know if it matters, but it certainly
works.
And you've got saved message folders and things like that.
You've got a literal signature file, which is where you can hit return there and you can
put some text.
There's also, if you opt out of that, you can have a signature file that it will attach
to your email as well.
So lots of different options here.
One of the cool options, I mean, I could obviously go through every single option on here.
It would be a lot better if you just kind of scroll through, like I say, this configuration
setup is really, really long.
But one of the cool options is you can enable an alternate editor.
So if you don't want to necessarily just type your emails in the little interface, that
Pine provides you, which is kind of, I would say, well, actually, I think it actually is
Pico.
So if you've ever used Pico, it'll be very familiar to you.
Because I think Pico and Pine are made by the same people, or same university or something.
But you could enable, you know, VIM or EMAX or something like that.
You know, in order for that to happen automatically, you will need to go down to enable dash, alternate
dash, editor dash, implicitly, and hit X, and that marks that on.
And then you can keep going down the list until you find a field called editor.
And then you can tell it how, what editor you want to use when you're down in the actual
body of the email.
And you can set that.
You need to set the full path so you can't just type in VIM or EMAX, you have to do, you
know, user slash bin slash slash slash user slash bin slash EMAX or whatever you're going
to use.
And the point is that you can do all this and it'll be great and you can just go crazy with
the options.
I would advise not doing anything too crazy at first because you just want to kind of make
sure that you get it up and running, you know, so don't start out with a whole bunch
of variables so that you don't know if the errors, you, how you set it up, or, you know,
if it's just an error because you did some weird option in all these setups.
So I would keep it simple first.
Once you're finished, you can hit E as an exit.
And it should ask you if you want to save your, save your settings.
And after you hit E and yes, you save, why for yes, you're back at the main menu.
All right, we would almost be ready to go right now.
In fact, we are technically speaking.
You can hit compose, see for compose, you can compose a message and it will, as long
as you've got access to that server that you, that you entered in, you will be asked
possibly for your password and then it will send your message.
Now I actually advise doing that thing right now because it's helpful to see you.
It's really interesting to see where it comes from.
So I did that and I sent it to one of my email addresses and looked at the, you know, the
reply to and the from and it's basically what it does by default is it takes the user
name of just your normal login name.
So if you're a Linux login name is John, but you're, you know, the email identity that
you have is class two, then suddenly your emails are going out from like John at whatever
your computer's name is.
So if you've, if you've even bothered setting up your domain and your, yeah, your domain
name or your computer for your, your internal network, you know, if you've got like darkstar.com,
then your email is going to be showing up as John at, you know, from, from John at darkstar.com.
That is probably not correct.
So if someone says reply, sends you a message back, chances are they are not going to
reach you.
What you need to do is go in and set up a rule.
And this rule will tell Pine or Alpine to instead of using the system default to substitute
the name in for something else.
Now the exception here would be if your user name happens to be your real username for
your email client, for your email service, and it's the same as your login name and it's
the same as the actual address of your email.
If you've got, if you just really consistent and you use, you know, the same name for everything,
then honestly you might be ready to go.
But otherwise, if you haven't set, you know, explicitly the, the place that this is being
sent from, then, then it's going to take just the system defaults.
And actually, you know, it might not take the domain name of your computer because we
set the, the domain name in the setup.
So, so actually, just be using your, your Linux, you know, login username point is it's
not going to get back to you.
So what you need to do is you go to a setup again, so it's s and then you go to rules are
and then you go to roles, which is are again.
So it's rules and then roles.
There will be a blank screen because you don't have any roles setup yet and so that you,
you can then say that you want to add a role and that is the a for add.
And once again, you're greeted with a really, really long list of, of options, luckily there's
only about, I don't know, maybe six or seven fields that we actually have to touch here.
The first thing that we should do is give it a nickname, this role, we should give like
a name to it.
So you can say, okay, the nickname is going to be, you know, reply to and then you can
also give it a comment.
So go down to comment, which is the next line and hit return and then it'll get you a screen
and you can, you can just explain to yourself, you know, why this exists so that if you're
sorting through these things later on, you, you have, you have some idea of why it's here,
what, what function it's serving.
So then what you can do is the current folder type, I think by default email will be selected,
which you could do, but basically I think it's just easier to hit to mark any because
any that way, if you, if you happen to be doing, you know, using pine for news groups or
something like that, then when you send something to a news group, it'll, it'll also give
your correct, you know, contact information.
So I put any.
The next option really isn't until it's pretty far down, let me find it, it's initialized
settings using role and that is, that's not that far down.
So you want to initialize settings using role set from, see, you're just setting the
from field, and then you can say, okay, so my, my, my name is class who and the actual
email is not clatu at hackerpublicradio.org.
You can set the reply to, I found that this was not necessary by default from what I can
tell everything when you hit reply, it, it, it, it replies to the from.
So I didn't really bother setting that, but if you're finding, you know, if something
goes wrong, that, that would be somewhere to start.
Now the uses of this rule, rule, are next, and that's, it's not very far down at all.
It's like one, one section down.
It says reply using, you want to just have it reply using that without confirmation.
You want to use the forwarding without confirmation, and you want to compose without confirmation.
So this is a rule that is just always going to happen.
This is your, this is basically a, practically a system preference at this point for your,
for your user environment.
Once you're finished setting all that up, you hit E again for exit setup.
It should again confirm that you want to save it and everything you do, and then you
can exit the setup menu and you're back in the main menu.
So it's E and then E again, and now you're back in the main menu, and you will see that
you've got, like I say, you've got an address book, and you've got C to compose an email.
You also have I for your message index.
Now I for message index will just take you to a listing of inbox, sent mail, saved
messages, things like that.
So that's just, you know, your normal tree of folders that you would expect.
You can go into any of those, and they should show you everything on the IMAP server.
Pretty much as simple as that.
The options are down at the bottom, like I say, if you've ever used Pico, you're going
to find Pine really pretty familiar.
It's got the same little style to it, you know, the options down at the bottom, just really
easy to understand.
And as you can tell from this tutorial already, I think it's really easy to set up.
It's just, it's a question of going to configuration menus and looking through the options that
you know with matter from your experience of setting up an email client in the past.
Now the address book is pretty nice.
You can just go down to that if you want, or hit A for address book.
And this is a list of people and their email addresses and stuff like that.
You can put that in the only way I really know how to do it is by hand.
There might be a way to import this from something else, I'm really not sure.
I just don't have that many people on the system that I'm using this for that I really
need to have an address book.
So I did that by hand.
But the cool thing about Alpine, like I say, is once you're finished with that, let me
exit my address book.
And once you're done with that, you can hit C for compose.
And you'll see that it prefaces it with a from field, which should be already filled
in for you using the rule that you've defined.
And then there's the two fields and you put in whatever you want.
So we'll put in a test email at, you know, whatever.com.
You can see it, you can add an attachment, type in the subject field, subject, and then
you go down one and it takes you straight into your editor, and that's pretty nice.
And I'm back and I see my message, my signature file or my signature appears at the bottom,
just as expected.
So now I'm going to send it, right?
So it's Ctrl X to send and then it says, are you sure you want to send that?
You say yes.
And it sends.
And it's as simple as that.
If you want to cancel, you can do Ctrl C and then C again for confirm.
And then it will send that email and it really is that easy.
And someone will get it in their inbox.
They will see it.
They will reply to it.
And when you go to message index that is I from the main menu, you will see their email
in your big list of emails.
And there are little letter codes by each email, you know, telling you if it's a new message
or if it's a little bit old, things like that.
So that's really it.
That's fine.
Just to reiterate that the server type was obviously going to matter a lot.
And it's going to matter a lot on who is setting this up.
And you know, the names of the servers and the user name and things like that.
So you might have to do a little bit of investigation to find out, you know, is this mail.example.com
or is this is this iMap.example.com or is it something entirely different, you know?
So figure that out before you set about this, it's going to be easier to go in with that
kind of information.
You know, you're not doing anything weird here.
You're allowed to ask your IT person, like if you're in a company or something for that
information, that's normal stuff for them to tell you.
So don't hesitate to ask for that kind of information.
And remember to use your real user name, me at work, I have a user name that I used
to get into the, you know, like the web interface and things like that.
But then I had to have the IT guys set up an alias for me.
And I was for a little while while I was setting up my alpine, I was putting in my, you
know, the alias name for getting that was not actually my user name and obviously that
did not work.
So user username, you'll be prompted for a password when you first launch alpine usually.
And then from then on, you'll be in and you'll be good to go.
So that is how to use alpine and use it with IMAP.
Like I say, you can use pop, pop stuff as well.
It's just, you know, instead of, instead of filling in IMAP stuff, it's pop.
You know, example.com usually and again, you'll have to figure out what your server actually
has you doing.
It could be anything in theory.
But it sits pretty much just like any other email clients all, it's all there in the
setup, config menu, type that stuff in, send email, receive email, delete it, store
it, live your life digitally online.
It's really cool.
So have fun with it.
And thanks for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
This has been Class 2 and it's been my pleasure talking to you about alpine and IMAP.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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