
Ask HN: Does anyone use Pine (now Alpine) for email any more? - plg
I used Pine on a Sun workstation in the early 90s to read my email. Loved it. Fast, efficient.<p>Does anyone still use it? Is it practical?
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concrete-faucet
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.

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a-dub
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!

~~~
peatmoss
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.

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shakna
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...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1830/how-can-i-customize-
new-mail-notification-in-alpine)

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ams6110
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.

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_wldu
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/

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environ
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](https://www.neomutt.org)

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leephillips
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.

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

~~~
leephillips
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.

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johnklos
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.

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drablyechoes
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.

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cjbprime
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.

~~~
leephillips
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.

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

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natoliniak
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.

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caseyf
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.

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

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

[https://github.com/pazz/alot/issues/1202](https://github.com/pazz/alot/issues/1202)

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peapicker
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)

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gregatragenet3
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.

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

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

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dvtv75
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.

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knarf180
I love pine. It goes well with my use of pico\nano

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

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m0d0nne11
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.

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

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pjmlp
Last time was around 1996 or so.

Since then I moved into GUI native ones.

------
puzzle
I bet Marissa Mayer still does.

