rudis dot net

Back in my day, we didn't have all these fancy web front-ends to e-mail with their pretty icons and mouse click crunchy goodness. We were lucky if mail got to us at all, since when I started it was *you* configuring the mail hops for uucp delivery (amongst other services). mail or mailx were good enough for us despite their bare-bones approach to message management. The Unix mbox format standardized things enough that other beasts came on the scene. elm was a contender for a while, but the leader of the pack was – and still is – pine.

pine is a mail tool maintained by the top-notch souls over at the University of Washington. I have used pine for as long as it's been available to the public (pre-POP3/IMAP), whether it be on a *nix variant or even a PC/Mac. At my previous employer where Exchange was king, pine served me well, even though it had to be eventually used in combination with fetchmail for various technical reasons.

When I finally switched over my personal mail to Google for hosting (got tired of fighting spam) I wound up using the web interface as the primary means of mail retrieval, simply because of my disdain for POP/POP3. Compared to IMAP (well call it the FedEx/UPS of mail), POP (aptly named after the government operated postal service) is a loathsome creature, fit for mole men or politicians and it just wasn't worth dealing with the fact that I wasn't always operating on the central message store. pine was rarely executed and I stopped staying current.

It wasn't until recent frustrations with GMail (and Google's awesome decision to partially support IMAP) that I started to look at pine again and was very pleasantly surprised to see that it's entering a new era with the release of alpine. The alpine project is a ground-up re-org of the pine source code with the addition of a really nifty web interface that is powered by tcl CGI scripts.

I managed to have just enough time today to grab the sources, do a build and get it installed and configured on my OS X workstation. It works beautifully with GMail and runs fine on the Mac – even opening attachments, but you can look forward to a full review after I've been using it for a few days. I am very eager to get the web version up and running as well if only to have a fallback in the even GMail "goes away".