Ask HN: Does anyone use Pine (now Alpine) for email any more? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone use Pine (now Alpine) for email any more?

39 pointsplg34 comments

I used Pine on a Sun workstation in the early 90s to read my email. Loved it. Fast, efficient.

Does anyone still use it? Is it practical?

The last time I used Pine was in the early 2000s. I had gone on vacation and during that time some computer virus caused mass emails over the course of a few days (can't remember any more detail than that). I returned to work with many tens of thousands of unread emails in my inbox. Outlook crashed upon opening because it couldn't handle it. After a few minutes of trying Outlook over and over again, I remember that I can check my mail through Pine on the UNIX servers. Log in, open Pine, delete mass emails, Outlook is ok again. It's a quality program.

Attachments were too annoying... so was tuning spamassassin (I guess that comes with running your own MTA- slightly OT). Off to Gmail I went (after around 10 years of doing my own email)... trading away the awesome decentralized internet for convenience... Whoops!

My middle ground compromise on the decentralized Internt was to move my vanity domain to Fastmail. It’s not the vision of everyone running their own email system, but it isn’t the Google monolith.

Plus, their spam filtering has been pretty good (about as good as Google’s IMO), I get push notifications out of the box with iOS, and the general fit and finish of the product suggests to me that they’re... a company focused on email.

Yes.

My reasons are the same as 10 years ago. It's fast, and easy to use.

I've got a notifier that adds unread to my PS1 [0].

Most awful html-only emails have a "open in browser" link that Alpine can read, which I usually use to go through elinks or similar.

[0] Modified from: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1830/how-can-i-cust...

I don't use pine anymore, but I do read my email in text mode. I use emacs for reading, notmuch for search/indexing, and w3m for rendering HTML email as text.

I use pine as my primary email client for all things. Even at work, I have pine set up as a client to Gmail for work's Gmail account. This is because I think that email clients which are basically web browsers are horrible, that I don't want anything to pull any data from any link without my express desire, and because stuff like Javascript has no place, now or ever, in email.

Email is text. If it's not text, then it's not email.

I'm a mutt user, but I have used Pine. Less is more and either or those are great MUAs. Minimal yet packed with features. You can read HTML fine in mutt. Don't listen to the naysayers.

And, speaking of lesser used mail readers. I was also fond of Slypheed years ago. It's a GUI, but very minimal. You may like to try it sometime too.

    https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

I have used Pine and then Alpine from roughly 1993-2017. The extension for PGP was working, but rather clumsy. I ultimately switched to NeoMutt about a year ago, which has a seamless PGP integration (searching on encrypted mail!), very good filtering capabilities, and a sidebar that shows folders. Goodbye pico, though and hello to vi. https://www.neomutt.org

I hope you don't consider my reply irrelevant, but I use mutt. It's roughly similar: fast, efficient, terminal-based. GUI mail readers are simply not capable of doing what I want. Also, with mutt, I can parcel out tasks such as spam filtering and searching to dedicated programs designed for those purposes.

What sort of things does a typical mail client not allow you to do/tweak that Mutt does?

For example, copy all messages from my inbox with subject "debug" that are older than 200 days into a new mailbox file, with just a few keystrokes, instantly, even if my inbox contains 10,000 messages.

Vim bindings out of the box

I used mutt for years, but missed a folder-overview that updated dynamically.

That made me switch to mutt-patched (the debian name of the package), which included the excellent "sidebar" facility. The sidebar gives you a list of all your folders you could scroll up and down, and was easily visible. You could also toggle it to show folders which only contained unread mail.

Over time I got annoyed that this still wasn't flexible enough. What if you only wanted to show folders which had received only new mail in the past 24 hours?

In the end I wrote my own console-based mail-client, which uses lua for scripting:

https://lumail.org/

This allows me to automate many things, for example I can mark each mail about a system-backup as read - if it succeeded, this level of automation isn't possible easily with mutt. Having a _real_ configuration language and binding functions to keys is very very handy though.

I didn't ever expect my client to become super-popular, as it seems few people choose console clients these days, but it is nice to see that it has a little bit of love.

The last time I used pine was sometime in 2012 or so, then I switched to mutt. This was how everybody was doing it in that particular organization, for some reason. The only way to check your mail was to ssh into some ancient centos server, and the only mail client available on it was pine.

Mutt is much better. If I did a lot of emailing, or needed to use gpg to sign/encrypt emails more often, I would probably still use it.

The problem is that these days everyone is sending HTML mail and expecting to receive it. So it's not very practical for that reason.

The full inbox search and anti-spam capabilities are also way below what you'd get from Gmail, although some of those are not Pine's fault since they're normally performed by a different part of the mail stack.

I use mutt and don't understand your comment about HTML email. I can consume it with no problem, and I've never run into difficulties with sending text (non-HTML) emails.

There’s a slight workaround in that you can have mutt pipe HTML messages through w3m —dump

Usually this preserves enough formatting to make the messages legible.

I use it daily, connected to a work Exchange server, though supplemented by the Outlook Web client for more HTML-rich content.

I still use it through an old terminal based unix email system . Works relatively well (of course opening attachments is tricky), although I feel like whats app/sms has significantly cut down my email use. I do miss Tin and the untamed and distributed Usenet.

I still use it and love it. Unfortunately I have to deal with a lot of email and the batch selection (; key) is huge for me.

I do use the pipe command a couple times a week to view a message in an email client that deals with HTML.

I cant imagine going without alot/xapian. If you like pine, checkout https://github.com/pazz/alot

Alot and, by virtue, notmuch are great. I recently switched to alot after using mutt for years, and I love that extensions can easily be written in python.

Pazz/alot checks the right boxes, but the bug list is a concern:

https://github.com/pazz/alot/issues/1202

Back when pine was a thing, I preferred elm. Remember, PINE = Pine Is Not Elm (supposedly a backronym). Much later I switched to mutt. Nowadays I’ve been assimilated by the borg. (Gmail)

yes. and run my own mailserver, although the overhead is hard to justify. But the alternative just seems icky.. I mean folks pitch a fit at what data they give to facebook, but don't blink about the mountain of stored private communication they've outsourced to google microsoft and yahoo.

alpine isn't my primary - evenly spread between it, thunderbird on the desktop and k-9 mail on the phone.

Have you ran into any large issues running your own mailserver?

Pine is an option on freeshell.org; I opt to use mutt

I use Pine from time to time on my PC, if I'm on my laptop and I've SSH'd in, or if I'm on my (older) MacBook or iMac.

I love pine. It goes well with my use of pico\nano

University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science uses Alpine as the default command-line email client.

Email has been crap ever since the Sooper Jeenyus children at Micro$oft and @pple foisted WWW browsers on us as email readers. I still use MH/exmh despite the inconvenience because I nurture the illusion that my personal info is slightly less compromised than if I handed it all over to Google to snoop through.

I used to use it up until a couple of months ago. Then I switched to claws-mail.

Last time was around 1996 or so.

Since then I moved into GUI native ones.

I bet Marissa Mayer still does.

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