Note: Pine has been obsoleted by Alpine and consequently is no longer available on silver. You should use alpine instead.

Pine, short for "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.

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

$ pine

You will be presented with the following screen:

  PINE 4.58   MAIN MENU                             Folder: INBOX  1 Message    


          ?     HELP               -  Get help using Pine

          C     COMPOSE MESSAGE    -  Compose and send a message

          I     MESSAGE INDEX      -  View messages in current folder

          L     FOLDER LIST        -  Select a folder to view         

          A     ADDRESS BOOK       -  Update address book

          S     SETUP              -  Configure Pine Options

          Q     QUIT               -  Leave the Pine program




   Copyright 1989-2003.  PINE is a trademark of the University of Washington.
                     [Folder "INBOX" opened with 1 message]
? Help                     P PrevCmd                 R RelNotes
O OTHER CMDS > [ListFldrs] N NextCmd                 K KBLock

To select a menu item, you can either press the key indicated (e.g. for help, it's ?; to compose a message, C) or move the highlight to the appropriate option with the up and down arrow keys, then press Enter.

If you just want to send an email, you can use:

$ pine [email address]

This will produce the following screen:

  PINE 4.58   COMPOSE MESSAGE                    Folder: (CLOSED)  No Messages  

To      : test@test.com
Cc      :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----















^G Get Help  ^X Send      ^R Rich Hdr  ^Y PrvPg/Top ^K Cut Line  ^O Postpone
^C Cancel    ^D Del Char  ^J Attach    ^V NxtPg/End ^U UnDel Line^T To AddrBk

You may notice that this bears a striking resemblance to pico or nano. This is because pine does actually use the pico text editor to compose mail (and nano is based on pico).

You will see that the Cc line is highlighted as this is what you are expected to enter next. If you want to enter multiple email addresses, separate them with commas. When you have finished a field, press enter. Once you get to the point that ----- Message Text ----- is highlighted, you can type the message itself.

When you have finished, press Ctrl-X to send the message, Ctrl-O to postpone it or Ctrl-C to cancel. If you postponed the message, you can go back to it by choosing the Compose message option and saying "yes" when asked if you want to continue the postponed mesage.