Pine (Program for Internet News and Email)

About Pine

Pine(tm)--a Program for Internet News and Email--is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. Pine was designed specifically with novice computer users in mind, but it can be tailored to accommodate the needs of "power users" as well. Pine uses Internet message protocols (e.g. RFC-822, SMTP, MIME, IMAP, and NNTP) and runs on Unix and MS-DOS/Windows.

Getting Started with Pine

Pine(TM) is an electronic mail system created and maintained by the Computing & Communications group at the University of Washington. To help support Pine, a starter version of this document was created by C&C in 1994 for Pine 3.9. To meet local needs and conditions, modifications may have been made to either Pine or this document or both by local computer consultants.

Pine is a trademark of the University of Washington. Permission to use this document for non-commercial purposes, in original or modified form, is granted, provided that the original source of the document is acknowledged as University of Washington Computing & Communications and that this paragraph, as well as the notice above, are retained on the title page of any documentation based on this text.

Starting Pine

In order to start Pine, just type pine from a command prompt. When you do this for the first time, Pine will alert you to the fact that it's creating a new subdirectory in your root structure called mail. It is in this directory that Pine will store your mail folders for later use.

Once Pine starts up, it displays its opening menu screen and divides the screen into three parts. At the very top of the screen there is one line showing you the current folder, (when you start up normally it is usually your E-mail INBOX) the number of messages in this folder, and the Pine version number. The middle of the screen lists the main menu functions available with a description of each. The bottom of the screen is a menu bar with other commands which are available. Click on the image below to see a full version of what the Pine main menu screen looks like.

More Help

For more information about Pine, choose a topic area from the list to the left or check out this site:

• Pine - Information Center at University of Washington (The developers of Pine)