Pine flyer

# PINE

Note: This is an unofficial HTML version of the original PINE flyer. For most up to date information check the latest version of PINE.

## Background

Pine is a mailer designed specifically for ease-of-use with the novice computer user in mind. It is based on Internet mail protocols (e.g. RFC-822, SMTP, IMAP, and MIME) and currently runs on a variety of UNIX platforms.

The guiding principles for achieving ease-of-use in Pine 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.

A stand-alone version of Pico, Pine's message composition editor, is also available. It is a very simple and easy to use text editor with text justification and a spelling checker.

## FEATURES

- - Mail index showing a message summary which includes the status, sender, size, date and subject of messages.
- - View and process mail with the following commands: forward, reply, save, export, print, delete, capture address and search.
- - Address book for saving long complex addresses and personal distribution lists under a nickname.
- - Multiple folders and folder management screen for filing messages.
- - Message composer with easy-to-use editor and spelling checker. The message composer also assists entering and formatting addresses and provides direct access to the address book.
- - Online help specific to each screen and context.
- - Supports access to remote mail repositories via the IMAP2 protocol defined in RFC-1176.
- - Support for multipart mail conforming to proposed MIME (RFC-1341) Internet standard. This allows attachments to mail messages such as graphices (GIF, TIFF...), sounds, and other files such as spread sheets and binary files.
- - Work is well underway to port Pine to MS-DOS. (Stanford's Mailstrom is recommended for Macs).

## AVAILABILITY

Pine and Pico, including source code and most up to date feature list, are freely available via anonymous FTP from ftp.cac.washington.edu on the Internet. Other provisions for distribution have not been made. From the Internet, you may try out Pine and leave comments by telneting to "demo.cac.washington.edu" and logging in in as "pinedemo". To join the Pine mailing list for announcements send a request to "pine-info-request@cac.washington.edu".

Pine is very portable and runs on a variety of UNIX machines including DECstations, NeXT's, Sequents, and Suns. Pine was originally based on Elm, but it has evolved much since, ("Pine Is No-longer Elm").

For further information send e-mail to pine@cac.washington.edu. Pine is the work of Mike Seibel, Mark Crispin, and Laurence Lundblade at the University of Washington Office of Computing and Communications.

92.7.13

The Nordic Users can alternatively look at the nic.funet.fi archive.