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Introduction (From Wikipedia) :
Alpine is a free software e-mail client developed at the University of Washington.Alpine 1.0 was publicly released on December 20, 2007.Alpine is a rewrite of the Pine Message System that adds support for Unicode and other features. Alpine is meant to be suitable for both inexperienced email users and the most demanding of power users. Alpine is developed at the University of Washington, as was Pine before it. Alpine can be learned by exploration and the use of context-sensitive help. The user interface can be customized.
Alpine shares a lot of common feature of console applications, like a rich set of shortcut keys, using keyboard instead of mouse to do all navigation and operation. In fact all operations in Alpine have corresponding shortcut keys.
Unlike other console applications targeting developers and experienced users, which often require users to edit a configuration file, Alpine allows the user to change most configuration options within the software. This makes alpine one of the most easy to learn console-based email clients.
Alpine supports IMAP, POP, SMTP and LDAP protocol natively. Although it does not support composing HTML email, it can display emails that only have HTML content as text.
Linus Torvalds, the primary force behind the development of Linux, has stated in an interview published by the Lifehacker weblog on 31 January 2008 that he uses Alpine as his email client.E-mail headers confirm this.
Configuration :
First of you have to download and install Alpine from here . If you are using debian or ubuntu simple type
sudo apt-get install alpine
and it will be automatically install for you .
Now open your terminal and type
alpine
and you will see a screen like the one below .
Now move your cursor up and down to the option S SETUP or simply press S from your keyboard and you will see a next screen like the one below
Now press L from your keyboard and go to the configuration screen like as shown in the next screen
Now press A and you will be presented with a screen like below
In the Nickname field put anything you want and in Server field put this
imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=username@gmail.com
Replace “username” with your gmail username.
Now press Ctrl+X and you will be asked for your password (dont worry if not), just give your password and hit enter . In the next screen you will see the new list just created by you .
Now press left arrow and you will be back to the main screen . From here again press S and then press C and you will see a screen almost similar to one below
From the start of the screen go slowly down and you will see SMTP server field and Inbox Path field. Now put the following details in both the fields respectively ( press enter to add detail)
smtp.gmail.com/tls/user=username@gmail.com {pop.gmail.com/pop3/ssl/user=username@gmail.com}Inbox
and then hit enter and give your password if you are asked for . Thats it now you must be able to read your emails and send emails from your Gmail account .
Remember Password
Now if you want that your password should be saved on your computer (dont worry its totally safe) , then open the terminal and if you are in your home directory then give the following command
touch .pine-passfile
How to read email
To read your email just type alpine in the terminal and from the menu select FOLDER LIST and there you will see the list created by you so select it and now you can read your emails .
If you have any problem , you can ask me for help through comments .
20 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 14, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Jagdeep Singh
Well done , Thanks for the post
December 12, 2010 at 4:23 pm
mukhtarz
Hi…thanks for the guide…really helpful…
Is it possible to configure alpine to deal with hotmail accounts? to send and read messages….
December 18, 2010 at 8:08 am
harbhag
with hotmail accounts you can only read messages via hotmail. AFAIK
December 17, 2010 at 3:09 am
jay
thanks for this! I wanted to be different from everyone else. this works awesome if you want a text email client. it reminds me of old school. thanks again.
February 14, 2011 at 8:00 am
jhardbrook
how do I set-up my hot mail account with alpine
February 14, 2011 at 1:52 pm
harbhag
Hi,
I never tried to do this as I dont use hotmail, but you can see this link below and check if it is of any help to you.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=242221
March 29, 2011 at 11:48 pm
Riderplus
Hi!
When I try to do this
touch .pine-passfile
I am prompted with
cannot touch ‘.pine-passfile’: Permission denied
Any idea would be useful!
Thanks!
March 31, 2011 at 9:05 am
harbhag
Seems like permission issue, try to use sudo.
October 27, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Hittesh Ahuja (@hitteshahuja)
nice one buddy!
December 7, 2012 at 12:53 pm
red
very helpful!
Thanks
December 8, 2012 at 6:25 pm
sidahmed
thank you is very clear
July 7, 2013 at 2:10 pm
alpine and gmail | alanhorizon
[…] https://harbhag.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/configure-alpine-to-sendreceive-emails-from-gmail/ […]
October 15, 2013 at 12:51 am
James
when checking inbox there’s nothing there, and when trying to exit alpine, it just keeps waiting on the server, but won’t exit. Ubuntu 10.04. Thanks
December 4, 2013 at 8:45 am
tony
[Error sending: Can’t connect to gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com,25: Network is unreachable]
I have used an install / config as per your example
I cannot send emails using alpine. My OS = Xubuntu 12.04
I have tried 3 times installing / removing this alpine ?? With no success.
above is the error message I am getting — which is bogus
because my Thunderbird email client connects just fine !
messy …
May 24, 2015 at 3:08 pm
anca
Have you maneged to fix this problem ?Because I’m trying to configure alpine now and I have this error too.
April 28, 2014 at 7:18 am
Configure Alpine to Send/Receive emails from Gmail . | M
[…] Configure Alpine to Send/Receive emails from Gmail . […]
August 16, 2014 at 6:02 pm
CHERUIYOT ALPINE
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October 16, 2014 at 3:42 am
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May 21, 2015 at 5:59 am
John Green
Hi
Thank you for the post.
I could configure my gmail to use alpine (without the INBOX PATH option) and all went well. But when I add other accounts, I have difficulty choosing which I account to use to send an email. For example if I have ACC1 and ACC2 configured. I can read emails from each account… but when I hit reply for an email in ACC2, I find that it says it is sent from ACC1 and I cannot change it.
How to configure alpine to ask which account to use?
Thank you again,
~hatim
February 7, 2016 at 2:31 am
Rick
Doesn’t work. I get old messages from 2011 with the pop in there. I put in imap instead of pop in that config line and it locks up and won’t work. I guess with El Capitan OS X, they have blocked up something somehow. You try to make something simpler and it just gives you more headaches.