Pine (email client)

Pine ("program for internet news and e-mail", originally " Pine is not Elm " ) is a text-based (terminal, text console) e- mail client and news reader for many Unix - compatible operating systems, DOS and Windows. It was developed together with the mail server software " UW IMAP " at the University of Washington ( UW). Pine was no longer developed after 2005. An upward -compatible successor program is Alpine.

The name is intended to express that Pine is a further development of the mail client Elm.

Pine used depending on the operating system either termcap or terminfo to learn the basic information to the terminal.

Under Linux Pine is linked against ncurses library, because they there the terminfo API provides, but the curses terminal management functions of libncurses not used for screen display. Pine instead contain their own specialized routines for screen display.

Strictly speaking, Pine, not just one program, because it uses even Pico, a small text editor to edit e-mail messages, as well as pilot, a file manager.

License

Up to version 3.9.1 the license to the BSD license was ajar, and the University of Washington Pine was registered as a trademark.

With version 3.9.2, the University of Washington changed the license insofar as though the source code still available, but the distribution of modified copies was no longer allowed.

Replicas and alternatives

Cone is a replica of pine, but can not match its capabilities. Mutt is a free alternative, but its user interface is not as configurable, so that when you change a certain transition costs arise.

Mbx file format

E -mails may be left of Pine on the mail server or stored locally. For local storage, the ' mbx ' file format was developed that is supposed to be a more powerful alternative to the common mbox format from Pine developer Mark Crispin. Files in mbx format consist of a binary header, which can be followed by one or several e -mails in ascii format. Pine | Alpine write local mailboxes both in the mbx and in mbox format and read. Due to the undocumented options "# driver.mbx / foo " and "# driver.unix / foo " can be controlled, in which format a new mailbox "foo " is created. The format of existing mailboxes is not changed.

Alpine

2006 announced the University of Washington that she is working on a new family of e- mail tools based on pine, but are licensed under the Apache license. On 29 November 2006 a public beta test of the Alpine said program was started. A short time later it was announced that the development of Pine will set. On 21 December 2007 finally Alpine 1.0 was released. Currently, the version 2.00, dated 26 August 2008.

Re - alpine

After the University of Washington had in the course of a fundamental change in their IT strategy in May 2008 dismissed a portion of their employees in the technology sector, including the long-standing Pine developer Mark Crispin, was reported in August 2008 by the UW that the direct evolution of Alpine would be set. As a result, the project "re- alpine" with initial support from Crispin was born.

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