The return of the console mailer: ALPINE

ALPINE start screenMany students had to use it at the university in the early years of the Internet: PINE, the text mode mail client. I was one of those students and I actually liked it and configured it to the maximum.

Somehow I later switched to Mozilla Thunderbird and haven’t used a text mode mailer since. But this week I discovered “ALPINE”. It is sort of “PINE reloaded”, as Open Source under the Apache License (think Apache License PINE).

I set it up for Gmail with IMAP (thanks to the author of this blog entry):

  1. Start ALPINE and type S L A (Setup > collectionLists > Add)
  2. Enter something like the following but replacing “id” with your gmail name:

    3. Nickname : Gmail
    Server : imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=id@gmail.com
    Path :
    View :

  3. Press CTRL-X and then E to save the setting.
  4. Type S C (Setup > Configuration) and set up SMTP to use the gmail server:

    5. SMTP Server = smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=id@gmail.com

I noticed that I had to install the package “ca-certificates” on my Kubuntu system. Otherwise I got a certificate error.

Leave a comment