Pine – Program for Internet News & Email

Last Updated on July 12, 2021

Pine is a program for Internet News & Email: a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. Pine was developed by UW Technology at the University of Washington. Though originally designed for inexperienced email users, Pine has evolved to support many advanced features, with an ever-growing number of configuration and personal-preference options.

Pine uses Internet message protocols (e.g. RFC-822, SMTP, MIME, IMAP, NNTP).

Pine’s message composition editor, Pico, is also available as a separate standalone program. Pico is a very simple and easy-to-use text editor offering paragraph justification, cut/paste, and a spelling checker.

Pine is no longer in developed (but remains supported) and has been replaced by the Alpine client.

Features include:

• Online help specific to each screen and context.
• Message index showing a message summary which includes the status, sender, size, date and subject of messages.
• Commands to view and process messages: Forward, Reply, Save, Export, Print, Delete, capture address, and search.
• Message composer with easy-to-use editor and spelling checker. The message composer also assists entering and formatting addresses and provides direct access to the address book.
• Address book for saving long complex addresses and personal distribution lists under a nickname.
• Message attachments via the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) specification. MIME allows sending/receiving non-text objects, such as binary files, spreadsheets, graphics, and sound.
• Folder management commands for creating, deleting, listing, or renaming message folders. Folders may be local or on remote hosts.
• Access to remote message folders and archives via the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
• Internet news support via either NNTP or IMAP.
• Aggregate operations, e.g. saving a selected set of messages at once.

Website: www.washington.edu/pine
Support: Pine man pages
Developer: University of Washington
License: Freeware

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