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Program for Internet News & Email. A tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. It was designed specifically with novice computer users in mind, but can be tailored to accommodate the needs of "power users" as well. Pine uses Internet message protocols (e.g. RFC 822, SMTP, MIME, IMAP, NNTP) and runs under Unix and MS-DOS.
The guiding principles for Pine's user-interface 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.
Pine's message composition editor, Pico, is also available as a separate stand-alone program. Pico is a very simple and easy-to-use text editor offering paragraph justification, cut/paste, and a spelling checker.
Pine features on-line help; a message index showing a message summary which includes the status, sender, size, date and subject of messages; commands to view and process messages; a message composer with easy-to-use editor and spelling checker; an address book for saving long complex addresses and personal distribution lists under a nickname; message attachments via Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions; folder management commands for creating, deleting, listing, or renaming message folders; access to remote message folders and archives via the Interactive Mail Access Protocol as defined in RFC 1176; access to Usenet news via NNTP or IMAP.
Pine, Pico and UW's IMAP server are copyrighted but freely available.
Unix Pine runs on Ultrix, AIX, SunOS, SVR4 and PTX. PC-Pine is available for Packet Driver, Novell LWP, FTP PC/TCP and Sun PC/NFS. A Microsoft Windows/WinSock version is planned, as are extensions for off-line use.
Pine was originally based on Elm but has evolved much since ("Pine Is No-longer Elm"). Pine is the work of Mike Seibel, Mark Crispin, Steve Hubert, Sheryl Erez, David Miller and Laurence Lundblade (now at Virginia Tech) at the University of Washington Office of Computing and Communications.
(ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/pine.tar.Z). (telnet://demo.cac.washington.edu/) (login as "pinedemo").
E-mail: <pine@cac.washington.edu>, <pine-info-request@cac.washington.edu>, <pine-announce-request@cac.washington.edu>.
(21 Sep 93)
Nearby terms: PIM « PIN « PINBOL « Pine » pin feed » ping » ping command
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