Learning Unix for Mac OS X, Second Edition

Electronic Mail with Pine

When you install Mac OS X or boot it for the first time, the installer may ask whether you want to sign up for .Mac, Apple’s suite of Internet services that includes electronic mail (email). If you signed up for .Mac, you probably use Apple’s Mail application to send and receive email. If you didn’t sign up for .Mac, you may be using an email account provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or employer along with Apple’s Mail or some other application.

There are many great graphical mail applications for Mac OS X. However, Terminal-based email programs have some benefits:

• They are often faster than graphically-rich email applications because their displays are so much simpler.

• They can be faster to use because your fingers don’t need to leave the keyboard.

• They are not affected by conventional email viruses, although security holes do appear from time to time in nearly every program that interacts with the Internet.

• You can read your email while logged in to your Mac from another machine (see Section 7.1).

Pine, from the University of Washington, is a popular program for reading and sending email from a terminal. It works completely from your keyboard; you don’t need a mouse. This section describes how to configure Pine and use it to send and receive email.

Start Pine by entering its name at a shell prompt. It also accepts options and arguments on its command line; to find out more, enter pine -h (help). Figure 8-3 shows the starting display, ...