~/cjudson $ pine
I made a list of things (or reasons) why I use my computer and most of
that list had something to do with communication with others. At the top
was email and since I had already been running mutt (clean text-based mail
reader that is a step above typing "mail" at the prompt but with lots of
improvements) and I thought I might give Pine (or Alpine) another try. I
gave up on Pine because I use GMail as my main source for connections to
the world and for some reason there's lots of steps to setting up Pine to
read and send GMail.
And so, I turned off the cron job for fetchmail and searched out the
answer to the question "How do I set up Pine for GMail?" And after some
tweaking, I got it to work. The better site that gave me most of my
answers was a post from virtualmyles2 tracked on ObjectMix.com
(http://objectmix.com/pine/326840-pine-gmail.html). I'm going to use what
virtualmyles2 wrote and add one change from my setup from this morning.
(Translation: Credit the above url for providing the info, only me for my
two contributions).
1. First enable IMAP on your Google account!!!
-Log into Google and click "settings",
-Click "Forwarding and POP/IMAP"
-Under IMAP Access click "Enable IMAP"
# Chris says "Whenever you see your.username at gmail, Google identifies
your username as username@google.com. So, it's your entire GMail email
address, not just the stuff before @google.com. Just remember:
user=your_username@google.com"
2. Your .pinerc needs to
be "something" like this:
user-id=your.username at gmail.com
user-domain=gmail.com
#Here's my other contribution: you need the "/novalidate-cert" Pine will
tell this when you try to send something the first time...that's how I
found out about it.
(all on one line)<= This is very important; it should be on one line.
smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=your.username at
gmail.com/novalidate-cert
(all on one line)<= This is very important; it should be on one line.
inbox-path={imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=your.username
at gmail.com}INBOX
(all on one line)<= This is very important; it should be on one line
incoming-folders=your.username at gmail.com {imap.gmail.com:993/
novalidate-cert/ssl/user=your.username at gmail.com}
(you probably have to check "enable-incoming-folders" in your Pine
Setup, Config as well)
(all on one line)<= This is very important; it should be on one line.
folder-collections="your.username at gmail.com" {imap.gmail.com:993/
ssl/user=your.username at gmail.com}[]
Be sure to save your work (:wq for my vim friends) and you should be good
to go (or at least I was). Pine will ask for your password and then the
option to save that password for your next session and then things are
pretty easy to figure out from there.
Pine (or Alpine, if you're using the very up-to-date version) impressions:
One of the reasons I like the cli is that hands are on the keyboard and
not running over to the mouse. One of the things that I'm not crazy about
is the combination keystrokes to get things done (I started with vim,
okay, and if my first editor was emacs, then maybe things would be
different). Beyond that, it's about getting to know another environment
and using the "O" (other cmds) a lot. Pine is easy, though, and it
<emphasis>seems<emphasis> to fill the gap between the terminal "mail"
command and the web-based version of GMail.
Later on I'll be taking a look at my other way of communicating: Twitter
and perhaps, Plurk. Also, I'll be looking at changing my prompt and a few
reminders about getting around.
~/cjudson $ exit
