pine is a popular program for e-mail on our system. It is menu-driven, includes a substantial built-in help system, and can process and send MIME mail. It can be used over a text-based (e.g., telnet) connection with no loss of features.

To run pine, make sure that you have correctly identified your terminal kind. Then give the command

You should see a menu resembling Figure 1: Pine Main Menu.

The most important choices are “C” to compose a message and send it to someone, and “I” to view an index of messages sent to you.

Sending Messages:

Type “C” to compose a message to send to someone. You should see a screen resembling Figure 2: Sending mail with Pine.

Use your up/down arrow keys to select the “To:” line at the top of the screen. Here you can enter the e-mail address you want to send a message to. Just below that, on the “CC:” line, you can add the e-mail addresses of any other people to whom you would like copies of your message sent. Two lines down is the “Subject:” line. Although you are not required to put anything here, proper e-mail “etiquette” calls for all messages to carry a useful entry in the “Subject:” line.

Finally, move the cursor below the “Message Text” line, and you can begin typing your message.

When you are done and are ready to send your message, type ^X to send it.

A common variation on this procedure is when you need to send someone a copy of a file as part of your message. For example, if you are sending your instructor a question about some code you are writing, you might want to include the code in question as part of the message. Pine provides two ways to do this. The easiest is to go up to the “Attchmnt:” line near the top of the screen. Any file names you type on this line will be “attached” to the final message when it is sent (i.e., a copy is sent --- your original files will be untouched). Alternatively, while you are typing your message you can ^R to insert a file directly into the text of your message.

Some points to keep in mind when deciding which approach to use are:

Receiving Messages:

From the main menu screen, type “I” to get a list of the messages in your system “mail-box” . It will look something like Figure 3: Reading mail with Pine.

Using your up/down arrow keys, you can select any of these messages and then type “V” to view the message.

While viewing messages, refer to the bottom two lines of your screen for the commands to page up/down through long messages, to compose and send replies to a message, to “forward” a copy of the message to someone else, or to return to the main menu (see Figure 1: Pine Main Menu).

If the message you are viewing is a MIME style message with attached files, another “V” command will allow you to view these files (if they are text, graphics, etc) or to save them in a directory of your choice. Also, the “E” (Export) command will allow you to save the text of the current message in a file even if it is not a MIME message.

Folders:

After you have read some messages and try to exit from pine, pine will ask if you wish it to move your read messages out of your system mail-box (called the “INBOX” ) into a “read-messages folder” . A folder is simply a container that can hold mail messages. Pine treats your system mail-box as simply a special form of folder. To see a list of your folders and to select one in which you want to view messages, use the “L” command from the pine main menu.

Moving read messages out of your system mail-box into another folder is often a good idea. It eases strain on the system resource area used for incoming e-mail. It means that when you enter pine and immediately hit the “I” key, you see your new mail right way instead of having it mixed in with old stuff. Finally, you can organize your saved mail by creating your own folders to save messages in. For example, you might have a folder for each class you are taking, to keep e-mail about different classes in separate containers. You can create new folders from inside the “L” command. To move a mail message that you are viewing into a folder, use the “S” save command.