Program for Internet News & Email. A tool for reading,
sending, and managing electronic messages. It was designed
specifically with novice computer users in mind, but can be
tailored to accommodate the needs of "power users" as well.
Pine uses
Internet message
protocols (e.g.
RFC 822,
SMTP,
MIME,
IMAP,
NNTP) and runs under
Unix and
MS-DOS.
The guiding principles for Pine's user-interface were: careful
limitation of features, one-character mnemonic commands,
always-present command menus, immediate user feedback, and
high tolerance for user mistakes. It is intended that
Pine
can be learned by exploration rather than reading manuals.
Feedback from the
University of Washington community and a
growing number of
Internet sites has been encouraging.
Pine's message composition editor,
Pico, is also available
as a separate stand-alone program. Pico is a very simple and
easy-to-use
text editor offering paragraph justification,
cut/paste, and a spelling checker.
Pine features on-line help; a message index showing a message
summary which includes the status, sender, size, date and
subject of messages; commands to view and process messages; a
message composer with easy-to-use editor and spelling checker;
an address book for saving long complex addresses and personal
distribution lists under a nickname; message attachments via
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions;
folder management
commands for creating, deleting, listing, or renaming message
folders; access to remote message folders and archives via the
Interactive Mail Access Protocol as defined in
RFC 1176;
access to
Usenet news via
NNTP or
IMAP.
Pine,
Pico and
UW's
IMAP server are copyrighted but
freely available.
Unix Pine runs on
Ultrix,
AIX,
SunOS,
SVR4 and
PTX. PC-
Pine is available for
Packet Driver, {Novell
LWP},
FTP PC/TCP and
Sun PC/NFS. A {Microsoft
Windows}/
WinSock version is planned, as are extensions for
off-line use.
Pine was originally based on
Elm but has evolved much since
("
Pine Is No-longer Elm").
Pine is the work of Mike Seibel,
Mark Crispin, Steve Hubert, Sheryl Erez, David Miller and
Laurence Lundblade (now at Virginia Tech) at the University of
Washington Office of Computing and Communications.
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/pine.tar.Z.
telnet://demo.cac.washington.edu/ (login as "pinedemo").
E-mail: <
pine@cac.washington.edu>,
<
pine-info-request@cac.washington.edu>,
<
pine-announce-request@cac.washington.edu>.
(21 Sep 93)