This explains how you configure your account settings in Apline, the text-based e-mail client that replaced Pine, both developed at the University of Washington.
Pine at AlbaNova is preconfigured by the standard AlbaNova setup to be used "right out of the box", so it does not need any configuration.
However, Pine has rather rich set of customizations, which might be very interesting. See below for instructions.
Pine can create and use folders on the IMAP server, instead of creating mailbox files in $HOME/mail. Go to Pine's main menu, select S)etup, then choose collectionL)ist.
Choose A)ddcollection. Pick a name for this folder collection. Enter imap.albanova.se as the name of the IMAP server. For "Path", enter INBOX. Do not enter anything for "View". Press ^X to save and exit.
Now, when you select a folder listing from Pine's main menu, instead of a folder list, you will see two "folder collections" in a menu. The first one will be "Mail - Local folders in mail/". Open that folder collection, and you will see your familiar Pine folders (note, you may also see INBOX there, that's a bit misleading because your INBOX really comes from IMAP, it's just that Pine always sticks INBOX into the first folder collection). The second menu entry will be your IMAP folders. If you open it, you'll see just one folder - "Trash". This folder is not really used by Pine, so it can be ignored. You can now create your IMAP folders by pressing A.
The names of IMAP folders may not contain periods or slashes. Periods are used as hierarchy delimiters - IMAP and Pine can create folders within other folders.
Choose A)dd folder, then enter "Work.Important". Instead of a new folder being created, Pine will display a new entry "Work.". This is a subdirectory of folders. Move the cursor and press Enter, and Pine will open the contents of "Work", which will contain an empty folder "Important". Choose A)dd folder, and create a folder named "Not Important". You now have two folders shown, "Important" and "Not Important". You can go back to the root folder collection by pressing '<'.
When saving messages to folders in Pine, you can manually type in the complete folder name, "Work.Not Important", or press Ctrl-T, then navigate your folder hierarchy.
You can only delete folders after you've deleted all messages from the folder. If you display the folder collection listing, go to the "Work." subdirectory and then delete both Important and Not Important folders, when you return to the root folder collection, the Work. subdirectory will automatically disappear. Subdirectories disappear automatically when all folders in the subdirectory are deleted.
It's possible to have both a folder named "Work", and a subdirectory named "Work." that contains other folders, however Pine doesn't implement it very well. You can go to the folder collections list, then add a folder named "Work", then add a folder named "Work.Slacking Off".
Pine will display one entry: "Work[.]". Pressing the '>' key will display all subfolders in the Work subdirectory, and pressing Enter will open the Work folder.
There will be a minor problem navigating the folder collection when you're saving messages in Pine. When Pine prompts you for a folder to save a message, you can bring up the folder collection list by pressing Ctrl-T, however there is no way to select the Work folder from the menu. The '>' key will not work, and pressing Enter will always display all subfolders in the Work subdirectory. To save the message in the Work folder you will have to type in its name manually.
If your folder hierarchy has gotten too confusing, and you don't know where a particular folder is, you can display all folders at the same time. You will have to create a different folder collection for this view. Go to Pine's main menu, choose S)etup then collectionL)ist, then A)dd CollectionList. Select a name for this collection,
imap.albanova.se as the name of the IMAP server. #allfolders.INBOX. (the trailing period is required) for the "Path".If you open this folder collection, you will now see every folder in your IMAP mailbox.
You may find it cumbersome to have two folder collections in Pine - the default folder collection of mailbox files in $HOME/mail and the IMAP folder collection.
From Pine's main menu, choose S)etup then collectionL)ist. You can simply delete your local mail folder collections. Pine will now create its usual "postponed-msgs" and "sent-mail" folders in IMAP, instead of creating mailbox files in $HOME/mail.
Note - you will lose all your messages saved in local mail folders when you do that, so make sure to back up any messages you want by copying them into a IMAP folder. Also, even if you remove the local mail folder collection, Pine will not remove $HOME/mail, and it will take up space until you manually delete it.
NOTE - if you use SqWebmail, resist the urge to go into Pine setup and rename "postponed-msgs" to "Drafts". SqWebmail will have a problem with Pine creating and deleting the Drafts folder at will.
This page was printed on 2025-01-07 from old.nordita.org/handbook/computing/email_help/access/alpine