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 https://www.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.www.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.www.pc-freak.net/pop3/user=hipo@www.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@www.pc-freak.net specifies my vpopmail created user which in my case is obviously hipo@www.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 www.pc-freak.net I’ve set the domain name variable to be:
user-domain=www.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.
