The most Frequently Asked Questions about Pine 1.1 What documentation is available for Pine? The Pine program itself includes extensive internal, context-sensitive help. Additional information, including a User's Guide, Technical Notes, Questions & Answers, where to obtain the Pine software, what tools are available to perform tasks that Pine itself does not, and more, can be accessed: * In the Pine Information Center on the World Wide Web at the URL: http://www.washington.edu/pine/ * Via anonymous FTP on the host ftp.cac.washington.edu in the subdirectory /pine/docs/. Here, you will find most of the documents from the Pine Information Center in plain-text form. * The Pine documents on the host ftp.cac.washington.edu can also be read from within Pine by defining a folder collection (from Pine's MAIN MENU, choose SETUP, Config; then move to folder-collections and choose Add Value) as: *{ftp.cac.washington.edu/anonymous}pine/docs/[] _________________________________________________________________ 1.2 Who should I ask for help with Pine? If you need assistance with Pine, contact the technical support staff or computer help desk of your Internet Service Provider, school, university, employer, ... -- whichever organization provided you with the email account on which you are using Pine. (Due to the large number of Pine installations worldwide, the University of Washington cannot provide individual support services to Pine users at other organizations.) You may also be able to find the answer to your question through the newsgroup comp.mail.pine; or the Pine-Info mailing list -- see http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/. _________________________________________________________________ 1.3 Why does command X not work? Some of the Pine commands you may read or hear about have to be explicitly enabled in the SETUP CONFIGURATION menu, which is accessed from Pine's MAIN MENU, to be functional. For example, to be able to use the "Bounce" command, the following feature has to be checked: [X] enable-bounce-cmd and to be able to use the "Select"/"Apply" operations, you must first check: [X] enable-aggregate-command-set _________________________________________________________________ 1.4 How can I filter messages into different incoming folders? Pine does not perform delivery filtering; that is the function of other programs, such as (on Unix hosts) "procmail" or "mailagent." For details on selection and configuration of such programs, see the Filtering Mail FAQ (by Nancy McGough) at one of the following locations: http://www.ii.com/internet/faqs/launchers/mail/filtering-faq/ http://www.best.com/~ii/internet/faqs/launchers/mail/filtering-faq/ Once you have successfully set up your delivery filtering, you will have new mail arriving in several different folders, in addition to your INBOX. You can then access these folders just like any other mail folder. You can also define a collection of incoming message folders in Pine, through which you can then TAB to read new messages. For more information, see Pine's internal help on the enable-incoming-folders feature in Pine's SETUP CONFIGURATION menu. _________________________________________________________________ 1.5 How do I define my own headers like Reply-To and Organization? From Pine's MAIN MENU, choose Setup, then Config. Move down to the customized-hdrs option and read the context-sensitive help screen. _________________________________________________________________ 1.6 How do I control what is displayed in the FOLDER INDEX screen? The display of fields in the FOLDER INDEX screen can be customized. For example, you can choose to have both the From and the To field (by default, the FOLDER INDEX will list the From address unless it is you, then it will list the To address) of each message shown; to suppress the message number display in each line; or to have the Subject field take up 60% of the line width. From Pine's MAIN MENU, choose Setup, then Config. Then go to the index-format option and read the context-sensitive help screen. _________________________________________________________________ 1.7 How can I have a signature automatically appended to my mail messages? From Pine's MAIN MENU, choose Setup, then Signature. The text you enter in the SIGNATURE EDITOR (new in Pine 3.92) will be appended to all messages you compose. _________________________________________________________________ 1.8 How do I send a message to multiple recipients without showing all their names? In Pine's message composer, with the cursor in the message headers area, press Ctrl-R ("rich headers"). Then read the context-sensitive help screens for the Bcc: and Lcc: fields. _________________________________________________________________ 1.9 How can someone without Pine decipher an attachment to a message I send? Pine uses the MIME Internet standard for attaching files to email messages. Any MIME-capable mailer should be able to "understand" Pine's attachments. If the recipient of your message with attachment does not have MIME-capable email software, they should be able to save the attachment to a file and then decode that. One freely-available program which can decipher a MIME attachment is munpack from Carnegie Mellon. It is available at: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack Another one is UUDeview, available at: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/~fp/uudeview/ _________________________________________________________________ 1.10 Can Pine be used with a POP server? As of version 3.96, PC-Pine cannot be used with a POP (Post Office Protocol) server. PC-Pine 4.00 will be able to access a POP server, but not in offline mode; that is, the computer running PC-Pine has to remain network-connected while accessing the POP server. Pine for Unix can be configured to access the message INBOX on a POP3 server using the folder definition syntax {pop3server/pop3}INBOX where pop3server is the hostname of the POP3 server. However, this method accesses the POP server in quasi-online mode, not in offline mode, which POP was designed for. Accessing the inbox on a POP3 server with Pine does not preserve changes to message flags (New, Answered, Deleted, etc.) between sessions. As an alternative, a program such as fetchmail (which supercedes popclient) can be used to download email from a POP server to a local Unix account, where it can then be accessed with Pine. fetchmail can be obtained from: http://locke.ccil.org/~esr/fetchmail/ Note: support for the offline mode of email access (using either POP or IMAP) is planned for a future release of Pine and PC-Pine. For a more detailed comparison of the POP and IMAP protocols, see Message Access Paradigms and Protocols at the URL: http://www.imap.org/imap.vs.pop.html _________________________________________________________________ End of Pine Frequently Asked Questions - more questions & answers about Pine can be found at the URL: http://www.washington.edu/pine/QandA/ or ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/docs/QandA.txt _________________________________________________________________