Pine (email client) Overview and Setup

Pine is a free and open-source email client that's been around since the 1990s. It's a simple yet powerful tool for managing your email inbox.

Pine is designed to be easy to use, with a minimalistic interface that gets out of the way so you can focus on your emails. Its text-based interface may take some getting used to, but it's actually quite intuitive once you learn the basics.

To set up Pine, you'll need to create a configuration file, which can be done using the Pine editor. This is where you'll set up your email account, including your username, password, and server settings.

For more insights, see: Set up Gmail with a Third-party Email Client

Pine Email Client is a user-friendly tool that gets the job done.

Pine is the Pine mail user agent.

Pine Email Client is a simple and effective email client that's perfect for everyday use.

Unix Mail Clients have a long history of being simple, yet powerful.

Pine is not the only Unix mail client, but it's one of the most popular.

Mutt and Elm are other well-known Unix mail clients that have gained a loyal following over the years.

These clients are often preferred by users who value simplicity and flexibility.

Some users even prefer to stick with the command line interface, rather than a graphical user interface.

If this caught your attention, see: Comparison of Email Clients

To avoid seeing a pesky message in Pine, you need to store the SSL/TLS public certificate of the Certificate Authority (CA) that signed your email provider's certificate.

Storing the CA certificate in the /etc/ssl/certs directory can solve the issue. For example, if the CA certificate is stored at /etc/ssl/certs/Equifax_Secure_CA.pem, you can create a symbolic link to it with the command "update-ca-certificates".

Pine uses a one-way cryptographic hash to verify the server's certificate, and it looks for a file by that name in the certificate directory. This file has a .0 extension, such as /etc/ssl/certs/594f1775.0.

If Pine is compiled to look for certificates in a different directory, you can use the truss utility to identify where it expects to find them. This can be done with the command "truss -o truss.out pine".

After running Pine and exiting, you can view the truss.out file to see where Pine is looking for certificates. You'll likely see a line like "open("/etc/ssl/certs", O_RDONLY)" which indicates the directory Pine is using.

The pine executable doesn't need any global configuration to function. Users can set Pine options in the ~/.pinerc file using an internal configuration menu.

If you need to customize your Pine experience, you can do so in the ~/.pinerc file.