Alpine, short for "Apache Licensed Program for Internet News and Email", is designed to be easy to use and by default has a reduced command set to help with this. It replaces pine, which is no longer developed.

Alpine will only run on silver and is started with the following command:

$ alpine

Changing the default colours

If you have previously used pine, the first thing you will probably want to do is change the colour scheme. To do this, press S (setup), K (Kolor), go to "Normal Color" and press enter. You can then select the colour combination you prefer - perhaps a white foreground colour and black background. Once you're happy with your selection, press E (To Colors), E (Exit Setup) and confirm that you want to save the changes.