The pine mail user agent developed at the University of Washington can read messages from the BSD mailbox, and it can also be used as an IMAP client or POP3 client to read messages from mailboxes on remote systems.

If only local mail is to be accessed (your BSD mailbox on the same system), no network connection is created, and no IMAP server or POP server is needed on the local system. If you have been using pine in this way you should continue to use it as always.

If you want to connect via pine to read mail files on a remote system, then there must be TCP/IP connectivity between your system where you are running pine and the remote system. The remote system must be running an IMAP daemon or server such as the PMDF IMAP server, or a POP daemon or server such as the PMDF POP server. ¹

Pine is also an NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol, RFC 977) client, and can be used to read news from NNTP servers like the ANU News program or many common UNIX NNTP servers. Of course, you have to know the name of one such system before you can use this capability. Ask your system or network manager for help.

The pine view is that messages are stored in folders, and folders are stored in folder collections. Folder collections may be physically located on the local system, or on any remote system with an IMAP server. Regardless of what system a folder collection is physically located on, a pine user sees it as just another folder collection: a pine user can read messages in any of their folder collections and can save (move) messages between different folder collections. See Section 2.4.1 below for more details on folders and folder collections.

Or a read-and-delete-only pine folder can correspond to the "new messages" folder on a remote system with a POP3 server. (The POP3 protocol does not provide access to multiple folders---it only provides access to the "new" messages, usually those in a special "new" sort of folder. The POP3 protocol also does not allow for moving messages into a folder.)

2.4.1 Pine Folder Collections

By default, pine knows only about the local folder collection, corresponding to your BSD mailbox. The use of additional folder collections is controlled by the folder-collections option in your pine resource file. Normally, this option is set from within pine by using the SETUP menu and then selecting the L collectionList menu. However, the option can also be set by manually editing your pine resource file.

2.4.1.1 folder-collection Option Syntax

optional-label {imaphost}optional-file[view]

or

optional-label {imaphost:port/user=username}optional-file[view]

optional-label is a label which will be displayed by pine in place of the full name of the folder collection.

The optional field imaphost is the name of a host where the mail file resides. imaphost may be any system which has an IMAP server.

The optional port specification may be included if you want to connect to a port other than the default (for IMAP) of 143.

The optional username may be included if you want to log in to the imaphost under a different account name.

The optional field optional-file is the file specification of a mail file. If optional-file is omitted but imap-host is specified, then the default mail file on the remote imaphost system will be used. If neither optional-file nor imap-host is specified, then your local default mail file will be used.

When connecting to an IMAP server on a UNIX system, the optional-file part of the specification is usually not used; instead, one simply specifies the mail folder(s) (mail file(s)) to access by specifying them as the view part of the value.

When connecting to a OpenVMS based PMDF IMAP server, however, the optional-file part of the specification must have the format

#disk:<directory>mailfile.mai#

where disk, directory, and mailfile.mai specify the full path, disk, directory, and file name, to the mail file. For instance, to select the mail file MEMOS.MAI of DISK$USER1:[BOB], you would specify

#DISK\$USER1:<BOB>MEMOS.MAI#

Finally, the view field controls which folders from the mail file are part of the collection. If specified as being empty, [], then all folders from the mail file are treated as part of the collection. Wild cards may be used to select folders matching a pattern. For example, [INFO-*] would select all folders beginning with the string INFO- from the mail file. Again, note that folder names are considered to be case sensitive.

For POP3 access to a new mail folder on a remote system, the format is:

"foldername" {pop3host/POP3}INBOX

or

"foldername" {pop3host/POP3/USER=username}INBOX

where foldername is the name by which pine will refer to the folder, pop3host is the name of the system running the POP3 server, and username is the name under which to log in to the remote POP3 server.

2.4.1.2 Example folder-collections Option Setting

folder-collections=local [], archive [/archive/mail], remoteVMS {vax.example.com}#DUA2:<JONES.MAIL>MAIL.MAI#[INFO*] remoteUNIX {sun.example.com}mail/[]

In the above example, four collections with the names local, archive, remoteVMS, and remoteUNIX are created. local consists of all folders in the local default mail file; archive consists of all folders in the mail file ~/archive/mail; remoteVMS consists of all folders whose name begin with INFO in the mail file DUA2:[JONES.MAIL]MAIL.MAI on the remote host vax.example.com; and remoteUNIX consists of all folders from the mail directory mail/ on the remote system sun.example.com.