How to configure pine (alpine) console client to
work with vpopmail pop3 and imap protocol
I needed to check my mail via ssh connection, as my installed
squirrelmail is curently broken and I'm away from my own personal
computer.
I did some online research on how this can be achieved and
thanksfully I finallyfound a way to check my pop3 and imap mailbox
with a console client called
alpine , better known in unix
community under the name
pine .
I installed
pine on my Debian with apt:
debian:~# apt-get install alpine
Here is my pine configuration file .pinerc used to fetch my
mail with pine:
a .pinerc conf file
to check my pop3 mail
To use that file I placed it in my home directory ~/ ,
e.g.:
debian:~# wget http://pc-freak.net/files/.pinerc
...
To attune the pop3 server configuration in the sample
.pinerc above one needs to change the value of:
inbox-path=
For example to configure pine to
fetch mail from the pop3 server mail.pc-freak.net and store
it locally in my home directory within a file called
INBOX
I have configured the inbox-path .pinerc variable to look
like so:
inbox-path={mail.pc-freak.net/pop3/user=hipo@pc-freak.net}INBOX
In above configuration's inbox-path variable configuration the
/pop3/ specifies I want to fetch my mail via the pop3
protocol , if one wants to use imap this has to be
substituted with /imap/
The value user=hipo@pc-freak.net specifies my vpopmail
created user which in my case is obviously
hipo@pc-freak.net
The other variables which are good to be changed in .pinerc config
are:
personal-name=
This variable has to be set to the name of the Email Sender
which will be set, if pine is used to send email.
I also changed the user-domain variable as it's used to set
the domain name from which the pine client will send the emails
from:
As my domain is pc-freak.net I've set the domain name
variable to be:
user-domain=pc-freak.net
Now after launching pine it prompted me for my email password,
putting in the pass did fetch all my new unread mails via pop3
protocol.
The only annoying thing was that each time I quit pine and start it
up again, I'm now asked to enter the email password.
This behaviour is really shitty, but thanksfully one can easily
workaround that by letting pine be constantly running detached in
gni screen session.