![[Pico ScreenShot]](/pine/graphics/pico.gif)
This general information on the Pine message system is also available from the main menu by pressing ?:
Pine® is the University of Washington's "Program for Internet News and Email." It is intended to be an easy-to-use program for sending, receiving, and filing Internet electronic mail messages and Internet News (Usenet) messages. Pine supports the following Internet protocols and specifications:
MIME allows you to attach any kind of file to your message, provided that your recipient also has MIME-capable mail software (which is readily available for most types of computers, although some proprietary mail systems do not yet support MIME). IMAP allows access to mailboxes on remote mailservers as if they were local.
Although originally designed for inexperienced email users, Pine has evolved to support many advanced features. There are an ever-growing number of configuration and personal-preference options, though which of them are available to you is determined by your local system managers.
Pine is a "mail user agent" (MUA), which is a program that allows you to compose and read messages using Internet mail standards. (Whether you can correspond with others on the Internet depends on whether or not your computer is connected to the Internet.) Pine also allows reading and posting messages on the Internet Usenet News system, provided that your site operates a suitable news server.
A "mail user agent" such as Pine is just one part of a messaging system. Here are some things that are not done by Pine, but require other programs:
Pine's message composition editor is also available as a separate stand-alone program, called PICO. PICO is a very simple and easy-to-use text editor offering paragraph justification, cut/paste, and a spelling checker.
New in version 3.92, Pine's built-in file manager - used, for example, to select a file for retrieval into the body of a message being composed - is available as a stand-alone program for Unix hosts, called PILOT (for "Pine's Lister of Things").
![[Pilot ScreenShot]](/pine/graphics/pilot.gif)
MIME stands for "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions". It is an Internet standard which allows transfer of binary files (word-processing documents, spreadsheets, images, sounds, etc.) between any compliant mailers, such as Pine. You can get technical information about MIME from the section Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) in the Pine Technical Notes.
Ongoing discussion on MIME takes place in the newsgroup comp.mail.mime. There is also a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list about MIME that is posted regularly to the newsgroups comp.mail.mime, comp.answers and news.answers, and also accessible at the URLs:
The MIME FAQ contains an appendix with useful information about MIME types.
IMAP stands for "Internet Message Access Protocol" and is defined in RFC-822. It is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server. In other words, it permits a "client" email program to access remote message stores as if they were local; Pine is such a client. You can get technical information about MIME from the section Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) in the Pine Technical Notes. For more details on IMAP, please visit the World Wide Web site The IMAP Connection at the URL: http://www.imap.org/
SMTP stands for "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol". SMTP was defined in 1982 in RFC-821, and is the standard protocol of sending internet electronic mail messages. Before sending mail from a mail client to the internet, the SMTP server must me assigned. Furthermore, the SMTP protocol regulates the transfer of messages between mail servers, directing a message to its final destination.
POP3 stands for "Post Office Proticol 3". POP3 is the most recent version of the POP protocol, and is described in RFC-1725. POP is the oldest and best known message protocol. There have been two versions of POP thus far. The first called POP2, became an email standard during the 80's, and was defined in RFC-918 in October 1984. POP is a client/server protocol in which user's email is stored on their mail server and downloaded to the user's machine. When a user or email client checks their inbox, a connection is made to the mail server, and the new messages are download to the local drive, and deleted. POP is a message protocol that allows for flawless offline mailing (Currently, Pine doesn't support offline usage, only online usage), not requiring the user to be connected to the server, useful for those with dial-up intenet connections. POP makes electronic mail easier on mail servers by decreasing server usage and maintaining more server storage space, making it a favorite of many System Administrators, but not the most powerful protocol available for end-users. Some email clients can leave all the messages on the server, and/or refuse to download a message above a certain size. As messages become larger, with formating, multimedia, and other attachments, flexibility in what is retrieved to the local machine is limited with POP. This is where IMAP comes in.