Pine is a user-agent for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. It was originally developed at the University of Washington with novice users in mind, but can be tailored to accommodate the needs of more experienced users. The UNIX, DOS, and Windows versions are maintained by the Computing & Communications group at the University of Washington and can be obtained from ftp.cac.washington.edu via anonymous FTP. A mailing list for Pine is maintained as pine-info@cac.washington.edu; however, bugs found in the PMDF version of Pine should be reported to support@process.com.

Pine has a full-screen interface which uses one-character mnemonic commands and control sequences for its command input.¹ You do not have to hit the RETURN or ENTER key to finish a command. A command menu is always present at the bottom of the screen, and help is only one keystroke away. It is intended that Pine can be learned by exploration and the browsing of extensive, context-sensitive on-line help provided within Pine, but some basic concepts to get a new user started are discussed below.