Using UMN IMAP with Pine

Before You Start

You will need your x500 id and password to make this change.

Ensure you do not have a forward setup on the central mail server. To check your central mail setup please visit: Account Information

Familiarity with a text editor (vi, emacs, pico, etc.)

Screenshots of Pine

Index of messages in a folder

Pine's folder list

Composing a message

Editing Your ~/.pinerc File

This configuration allows pine to access local and remote folders. You will have a local and a remote inbox, and you will also have remote and local folders. You can save mail locally or remotely using the pine save command.

1. Backup your ~/.pinerc file (eg. cp ~/.pinerc ~/.pinerc.bak)
2. Open the ~/.pinerc file in your favorite editor.
3. Find the line user-domain= (~ line 19) and change it to following:

   user-domain=math.umn.edu

4. Find the line smtp-server= (~ line 22) and change it to following smtp-server= if you run pine inside the School of Mathematics.

   Outside of the University of Minnesota, set the SMTP server line to smtp-server=smtp.umn.edu:587/tls/user=doex1234.

5. Find the line inbox-path= (~ line 29) and change it to the following replacing x500id with your x500 id:

   inbox-path={x500id.email.umn.edu:993/ssl/user=x500id}inbox

6. Find the line folder-collections= (~ line 255) and change it to following replacing x500id with your x500 id:

   folder-collections=local mail/[],remote {x500id.email.umn.edu/ssl/user=x500id}mail/[]

Notes

• In most mail sessions you'll be asked for your password once when you open pine. Pine will remember it until you close pine.
• Mail mail reciepients will see math_user_id@math.umn.edu as the email address. For example, if my Math id is smith and my x500 id is smith009, mail will arrive as smith@math.umn.edu
• The above pine setup gives you access to your current local mail folders and remote folders.
• You are encouraged to save remote mail to your local home directory to save space on the remote server.
• You only have ~50MB of space on the remote server for remote folders not including your INBOX. Your inbox can be of an unlimited size, but it is recommended you move old inbox messages to another folder (remote or local), because it will make it unbearably slow to check large inboxes.
• You will not need to use a seperate program (eg. ftp, scp, etc.) to download attachments to your local machine. You will be able to save attachments to your local computer using Pine.

Handling with SPAM

You can move mail marked as SPAM to a folder of your choice automatically using the following configuration.

1. Enter pine and type 's' for setup
2. Type 'r' for rules
3. Choose 'f' for filters
4. Choose 'a' for add filter
5. Give the filter an understandable nick name
6. Arrow down to the 'Subject pattern' field
7. Enter the following:
   *****SPAM*****
8. Arrow down to the 'Filter Action' field, and choose 'Move'.
9. Then in the 'Folder List' field pick a folder name where the SPAM should be moved
10. Type 'e' for Exit, 'y' for save changes, and 'y' again to create new folder (if new).
11. Now all mail marked as SPAM should be moved to your chosen folder.

Changing Applications for Attachments

To change what program pine uses to handle attachments you can modify your accounts mailcap and mime-types files. For example, to change what pine launches to view dvi files add the line application/x-DVI dvi to your ~/.mime-types file, and the line application/x-DVI;/usr/bin/xdvi %s to ~/.mailcap.

If pine doesn't pick it up after that, you'll have to append the value /home/grad/johndoe/.mailcap to the mailcap-search-path line in your ~/.pinerc. This line is colon delimited, so if there is something there already to the right of the equals, you'll have to add a colon as well.

Most of the information is located at http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/pine-info/misc/mime.html except for the mime-type for dvi, which is unofficially application/x-dvi.

Alpine with GoogleApps

Alpine can connect to GMail with the ~/.pinerc configuration lines below.

# Alpine configuration to access Gmail servers -- 
# Uses the GoogleApps "client password" not your x500 password.
# Replace `doex555` with your x500 username.
user-domain=umn.edu
smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=doex555@umn.edu
inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=doex555@umn.edu}inbox
folder-collections=local mail/[],
	remote {imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=doex555@umn.edu}mail/[]