Description

Alpine is one of the oldest email clients in the world. It's a rewrite of the 'pine' mailclient, which originated from 1989. I still use it to read my email. Very safe to have a text based email client!

Configuration

The following options can be punt in .pinerc in your homefolder. To get your mail via IMAP:

inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=username@gmail.com}

Include this to make sure you have access to all of the various gmail folders:

folder-collections=Gmail {imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=username@gmail.com}[]

I find this useful to mimic "archiving":

default-saved-msg-folder=[Gmail]/All Mail

To send mail via gmail, you need this in .pinerc:

smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=username@gmail.com

Also, I find that these two settings improve performance a lot:

rsh-open-timeout=0
disable-these-authenticators=GSSAPI

If you want alpine to remember your password for you, you can run this command in your home directory:

touch .pine-passfile

The first time you use alpine after running this command, you will be asked whether you want to save your password for later use each time you enter one.