In Unix and PC-Pine 3.90 and higher, the PINE RELEASE NOTES (Press "R" when on the [M]AIN MENU) contain a section on Configuration, including default file names and environment variables. Almost all personal configuration can be accomplished through the SETUP CONFIGURATION SCREEN (Press "S Setup" then "C Config" when on the [M]AIN MENU.
Unix Pine uses three configuration files: a system-wide defaults file, a system-wide non-overridable settings file and a personal coniguration file (.pinerc in the user's home directory).
If you run "pine -pinerc new_pinerc_file_name" (ex. "pine -pinerc pinerc.blank") you will get a fresh copy of your .pinerc configuration information placed into the file "new_pinerc_file_name" with the options you are using set. It will also have fresh comments, and then everything in the config screen and the pinerc file should match. Old variables that are no longer being used will disappear. If you ever plan on editing your .pinerc file in the future (and don't want to be confused by obsolete comments), it would be a good idea to run the command: "pine -pinerc .pinerc", or in the case of PC-Pine: "pine -pinerc \pine\pinerc" (assuming your pinerc file is in the \pine directory on your PC.)
If you need to generate a "blank" copy of the system wide configuration files
(can usually only be done by systems administrator), run
"pine -conf > /usr/local/lib/pine.conf".
Pine doesn't have that capability built in. You can only set configuration options which apply to the whole pine session; not to particular situations.
One way to get part part of the effect of per-folder customization is to have several custom .pinerc files and shell aliases which use them. For example if you want pine to behave a certain way when you are reading newsgroups, you might copy your .pinerc to a new one which you will customize for newsreading:
cp .pinerc .pinerc-news
Then you can start pine using the separate configuration file with the command:
pine -p .pinerc-news
After doing that, you can make all the changes you want to settings to make life easier when reading news, and save the configuration. If it is a problem to enter that pine command every time, add this line to your .cshrc file:
alias pinen 'pine -p .pinerc-news'
to create a "pinen" command. You could add to that and have the configuration file use the "initial-keystroke-list" variable to go to the newsgroups list. E.g.,
initial-keystroke-list=l,n,cr
You can also do a lot with the pine command line options and a shell alias for that.
For more information on Pine Command Line Options use "pine -h" or view the Pine Technical Notes concerning Pine Command Line Options.
Versions of PC-Pine prior to 4.00 cannot be used with a POP (Post Office Protocol) server. With Unix Pine, and with PC-Pine 4.00 and after, you can access a POP server in "online" mode. That is, Pine will start a POP3 session and keep it open until the mailbox is closed. Due to the nature of the POP3 protocol, Pine will not see any new mail which arrives during the POP3 session. Thus new mail only arrives upon starting a session.
To access the message INBOX on a POP3 server, use the folder definition syntax:
{pop3server/pop3}INBOX
or, especially useful if your POP account user-id is different from the one in your Pine configuration:
{pop3server/pop3/user=popuserid}INBOX
where pop3server is the hostname of the POP3 server, and popuserid is your user-id for your POP account. However, this method accesses the POP server in quasi-online mode, not in offline mode, which POP was designed for. Accessing the inbox on a POP3 server with Pine does not preserve changes to message flags (New, Answered, Deleted, etc.) between sessions.
As an alternative, a program such as fetchmail (which supercedes popclient) can be used to download email from a POP server to a local Unix account, where it can then be accessed with Pine. fetchmail can be obtained from:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail/
For a more detailed comparison of the POP and IMAP protocols, and discussion of the various message access modes (online, offline, disconnected), see:
Message Access Paradigms and
Protocols
RFC-1733: Distributed
Electronic Mail Models in IMAP4
Pine does not support the old POP2 protocol, and there are no plans to do so.
If the user has manually changed their From: header, or can receive mail with other addresses, Pine must be aware of these alternate addresses, by having them entered in in the alt-addresses option in SETUP CONFIGURATION.
The following applies to Pine for Unix only
See also the FAQ: "11.4.3 How do I control what is displayed in the FOLDER INDEX screen?."
The following is concerned with Pine displaying the user's own name, rather than the name of the recipient, in folder index listings of messages they have sent. This occurs when Pine detects the specific hostname of the computer on which it is running in the From: header. To avoid this from happening, set use-only-domain-name in Pine's SETUP CONFIGURATION menu to Yes; this strips the name of the specific host from your From: address. Alternatively, specify your domain name in user-domain (be sure you enter it correctly, otherwise all your outgoing messages will have an invalid return address! Ask your local computing support people if in doubt). When setting either of these options, also read the help screen for quell-user-lookup-in-passwd-file to see whether you should enable that feature too.
Administrators of systems where Pine exhibits this behavior should also check the /etc/hosts file for invalid entries; as an example, it should read:
123.456.78.90 hostname.domain hostname
not just
123.456.78.90 hostname
-- otherwise, users' setting of use-only-domain-name to Yes will not have the intended effect.
Q&A submitted by: Timothy J. Luoma <luomat+pine@luomat.peak.org>
From Pine's [M]AIN MENU, choose [S]etup, then [C]onfig. Move down to the customized-hdrs option. Press "A Add Value". Use the format:
From: "My Real Name" <myusername@domain.edu>
Note: You may wish to add 'From:' to the list of default-composer-hdrs so you can change the From line more easily when composing new messages. The process is the same as for adding the "From:" line to the customized-hdrs entry.
Press Return to accept the change, and "E Exit Setup".
Important: By default you are not allowed to change your
"From:" line.
When you go to COMPOSE MESSAGE and get the error:
[Not allowed to change header "From"]
then you, if you are installing Pine yourself, or your systems administrator (if users changing their From lines does not violate your site's policy) will have to recompile Pine.
Note: Changing the "From:" line may not give you the anonymity you desire, since the "Sender:" or "X-Sender:" line may still include your entire email address.
In Pine 4.00, users can add allow-changing-from to the feature-list in their pinerc file (by editing the file, not via SETUP CONFIGURATION); recompiling is not necessary.
See also 12.13 What do I need to do when compiling PINE to let users change their "From:" line?
A thorough guide concerning this subject is available at infinite ink by
Nancy Mcough at the URL:
http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/changing_from/
From Pine's [M]AIN MENU, choose [S]etup, then [C]onfig. Move down to the customized-hdrs option and read the context-sensitive help screen.
From Pine's [M]AIN MENU, choose [S]etup, then [S]ignature. The text you enter in the SIGNATURE EDITOR (new in Pine 3.92) will be appended to all messages you compose. With the signature-at-bottom feature in SETUP CONFIGURATION, which alters the placement of the text in replies (but not forwards because everything below:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Should be contents of the forwarded message only).
You can create multiple signature files outside of Pine (using, for example, the Pico editor) and then include whichever one you wish, wherever you wish, in a message you are composing in Pine via the "^R Read File " command in the composer. If the file names you choose are very short (e.g. s1, s2) this is relatively painless.
Signature Etiquette: by Sven Guckes
http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/elm/elm.sig.etiquette.html
If you find Pine's tendency to ask you for confirmation on certain operations annoying, you may suppress several of the prompts. In the SETUP CONFIGURATION screen, reached from the MAIN MENU, look for the features ending in -without-confirm, beginning with auto-, and for include-text-in-reply. Read their help screens to be sure to understand what enabling these features will do.
Pine now supports mail filtering, see the Pine Technical Notes for more information
However, the function of other programs, such as (on Unix hosts) "procmail" or "mailagent" are better suited for this task. For details on selection and configuration of such programs, see the Filtering Mail FAQ (by Nancy McGough):
http://www.ii.com/internet/faqs/launchers/mail/filtering-faq/
Once you have successfully set up your delivery filtering, you will have new mail arriving in several different folders, in addition to your Inbox. You can then access these folders just like any other mail folder. You can also define a collection of incoming message folders in Pine, through which you can then TAB to read new messages. For more information, see Pine's internal help on the enable-incoming-folders feature in Pine's SETUP CONFIGURATION menu.
The display of fields in the FOLDER INDEX screen can be customized. For example, you can choose to have both the From and the To field (by default, the FOLDER INDEX will list the From address unless it is you, then it will list the To address) of each message shown; to suppress the message number display in each line; or to have the Subject field take up 60% of the line width. From Pine's MAIN MENU, choose Setup, then Config. Then go to the index-format option and read the context-sensitive help screen.
This requires one, and possibly two, configuration changes, which may already have been performed by your system administrator:
Note: many files attached to email messages (though not email messages themselves) can contain viruses -- unless from a trustworthy source, don't open them without checking them for viruses first, as far as possible! If in doubt about the nature of an attachment, ask the sender what application was used to create it; and/or ask the sender to resend the message with the attachment, this time disabling any special encoding techniques that his/her email software may be employing.
Here are a sample MAILCAP file for PC-Pine:
# PC MAILCAP SAMPLE FILE
# All lines beginning with the # symbol are comments.
# As some long directory and/or filenames suggest,
# the examples here are for a PC running the Windows95 operating system.
# These examples using certain third-party software programs do not
# constitute any recommendation thereof by the University of Washington.
# Open image files with Paintshop Pro for viewing/editing:
image/*;"C:\Program Files\Paint Shop Pro\Psp.exe" %s
# Play audio and video files via Internet Explorer WWW browser:
audio/*;"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\Iexplore.exe" %s
video/*;"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\Iexplore.exe" %s
# View HTML files with Netscape WWW browser:
text/html;"C:\Program Files\netscape\Navigator\program\netscape.exe" %s
# Unpack ZIPed archives with WinZip:
application/zip;"C:\Program Files\WinZip\WinZip32.exe" %s
# View PDF files with Acrobat Reader:
application/pdf;"C:\Acrobat3\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" %s
#You can add other entries below for other MIME types...
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and a sample MIMETYPE file for PC-Pine:
# PC SAMPLE MIMETYPE FILE
# All lines beginning with the # symbol are comments.
# Line format: MIME Type/Subtype, associated filename extensions.
text/plain txt dat
text/html html htm
audio/basic au snd
audio/x-realaudio ra ram
audio/x-wav wav
image/gif gif
image/jpeg jpeg jpg jpe
image/tiff tiff tif
video/mpeg mpeg mpg mpe
video/quicktime qt mov
application/postscript ai eps ps
application/rtf rtf
application/pdf pdf
application/zip zip
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which you can copy and edit as needed to conform to the location of applications on your system (in the MAILCAP file), and to the filename extensions of files (in the MIMETYPE file). (Note: Unix Pine uses different pathnames and applications than PC-Pine.)
Applies to Pine for Unix only
When viewing the message, use the '|' (Pipe) command and give it the following:
tr '[A-Za-z]' '[N-ZA-Mn-za-m]'
You could also write a script, maybe called unrot, that does this and then pipe the message to the script.
In order for the pipe command to work you need to be using Pine 3.90 or higher and have the enable-unix-pipe-cmd feature set.
Applies to Pine for Unix only
Beginning with version 3.92, the program Pine uses for spell checking in its message composer can be specified with the speller option in the SETUP CONFIGURATION menu. For Pine versions before 3.92, and for Pico, read on:
Why use Ispell with Pine (and Pico)?
------------------------------------
- it allows you to add words to a private dictionary so that your name
(technical words, etc.) will not be reported as errors;
- it offers correct spellings for misspelled words, and you can
select one of the offered alternatives by pressing a single key;
- it spell checks the document from top to bottom (rather than jumping
around in alphabetical order) so you can anticipate the next words to
be checked;
- because it checks from top to bottom, you can stop the program after
checking your reply (at the top) without checking the message you are
replying to.
How do I use Ispell with Pine (after it is installed) ?
-------------------------------------------------------
After you have installed Ispell in pine, when you are entering a message
into the pine composer and the cursor is in the "Message Text" area of the
screen, you can press ^_ (Control-underscore), to check the spelling of
your message. The message header cannot be spell-checked.
Inside the ispell program, you can press the following keys:
? Help for ispell
space Accept the word - this time only
A Accept the word - for the rest of the file (message)
I Accept the word - and Insert it in your private dictionary
0-9 Replace the word with one of the suggested alternatives
R Replace the word completely (then you enter the replacement)
Q Quit checking this file - corrections will be saved
X Exit immediately - corrections will be lost
If the spell check halts and you see "(INTERRUPT)" in the upper-left
corner of the screen, just press the <SpaceBar> to continue. Generally
when this happens, the spell check is complete. See 'man ispell' for
more information on the ispell program.
How do I install Ispell in Pine ?
---------------------------------
There are a couple ways to use Ispell within Pine; method #1 is usually
all you need to do. It's very easy; just follow the instructions below.
PINE -- METHOD #1:
Set your alternate-editor to ispell, then you can press ^_
(Control-underscore) in the composer to invoke ispell.
To do this, follow these steps (press the "key" in each step):
- Check to be sure that the ispell program is installed on your system,
and use the correct directory path; at the unix prompt, enter the
command: 'which ispell'. The following instructions assume output
from this command was '/usr/local/bin/ispell'.
- start the 'pine' program
- from the [M]ain-Menu of pine
- press [S]etup
- then [C]onfig
- then [W]hereIs and enter 'editor' (without the ' marks)
and press <ENTER>
- press [W]hereIs and <ENTER> until you find the line:
editor = <No Value Set>
- press [A]dd-Value, and enter '/usr/local/bin/ispell' (without 's)
and press <ENTER>
- you should now see:
editor = /usr/local/bin/ispell
- if so, press [E]xit-Config, and you are done!
You can still press ^T to use the standard pine spell-checking program
(which will -not- use your personal dictionary, and will not offer
suggestions for correct spelling).
PINE -- METHOD #2:
Pine already checks the SPELL environment variable to locate the spell
checking program, so you can create the following script and name it
'spell':
#!/bin/sh
ispell -l
To make ^T in pine use 'ispell' and your private dictionary:
- make the above script file 'spell' in your home directory
- make it executable: 'chmod u+x spell'
- set the environment variable SPELL: 'setenv SPELL $HOME/spell'
(include this command in your .profile, .cshrc or .login file)
Now, when you press ^T in pine, you will execute the ispell program, and
it will recognize words stored in your private dictionary. The screen
display will look like pine is using the standard spell-checking program,
except words will be checked from top to bottom in the message, rather
than in alphabetical sequence. This method does not allow you to Insert
words into your private dictionary. However, this might be useful with a
central script file (setenv SPELL ...) and a central private dictionary
(ispell -p ...) to provide a common private dictionary for an entire
workgroup. The manager could add items to the private dictionary; other
people could use the private dictionary (^T), but they could not change
it.
PICO:
To use ispell with pico (the stand-alone editor):
- implement the 'ispell' program via ^T (CTRL-T) (using the script file)
in addition to implementing it via ^_ (CTRL-_) (using pine [S]etup,
[C]onfiguration as described above).
Use ^T in pico to use the ispell program and your private dictionary
(but without the ability to add words to the dictionary). You cannot
use ^_ in pico; it is an "Unknown Command". You can use ^T-ispell in
pine also, but why bother when ^_ works better.
[MRamey]
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Add the following lines to your feature-list:
termdef-takes-precedence
and
enable-arrow-navigation
The first one allows your termdef file to be used for the specified emulations. The second allows the arrow keys to be used under a mixed environment. Please note, however, that this may break the arrow key navigation in some terminal types.
Thanks to Bryan Springborn for suggesting this Q&A.
PC-Pine 4.00 has spell-checking built in. For older versions, read on:
Brian Quinion has developed a Spell Checker for Windows that can be used with many Microsoft Windows applications that do not have their own spell checker.
Spell Checker for Windows requires Windows version 3.1 or higher. A 32-bit version of the spell checker is not available yet (as of 27 Sep. 1996) and the 16-bit version of the Spell Checker for Windows does not work with the 32-bit version of PC-Pine.
The following installation instructions have been tested on Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT and Windows95 with the 16-bit version of PC-Pine. This installation assumes that the 16-bit version of PC-Pine is already installed.
From: Andreas Prilop <andreas.prilop@altavista.net>
Applies to PC-Pine only
PC-Pine allows you to use other character sets in your email and news messages than specified in the operating systems. (Reference: http://www.washington.edu/pine/tech-notes/low-level.html#char-set)
For example, you might use Code Page 852 or Code Page 1250 on your PC, but send and receive messages in ISO-Latin-2 (ISO-8859-2). To do this, you need certain mapping tables. These tables support not only Latin-2, but also Latin-3, Latin-5 (Turkish), Latin-8 (Baltic), Greek, and Cyrillic.
Reference informtion can be found at:
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO8859/
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/IBM/
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS//MICSFT/PC/
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOWS/
Mapping tables can be downloaded from:
ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/coast/win3/mail/pinetabN.zip
ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/coast/msdos/network/pinetabN.zip
(where N is a number), and other software FTP repositories.