[Editor's note: Submitted by phlbbrtn on Sat Jul 28]
I came to Macs from being a PC Linux user previously. One thing I have missed in the Macintosh world is my all-time favorite mail reader -- Pine. Pine is a plain-text Mail User Agent. It is designed to be used primarily on networked UNIX systems. Thus it is not set up to perform all the functions of Mail.app or Outlook Express. All you can do with it is read, write and send mail. It also has an Address Book. But for accessing your mail you need a Mail Transport system like Sendmail, Postfix, or Qmail. For POP mail accounts you need, in addition, something like Fetchmail to get your mail from your ISP.
I had been wondering, since installing OSX, if there was a way to use Pine in OSX -- as a Terminal program. The trouble with that is that you would have to make the effort to configure Sendmail [editor: and this has been described to me as one of the tougher things to do in UNIX!]. But mine is a single-user Mac with an ISP and a POP mail account. Sendmail is overkill. Yesterday I figured out how to do it.
Read the rest of the article if you'd like a step-by-step guide on how to install and use Pine with your POP-based email accounts.
Here are the ingredients...
Go to http://www.osxgnu.org/ and download the following:
gnutar xzvf getmail*tgzThe file "getmail" and those with the ".py" suffix will have to go into /usr/local/bin or anywhere on your command path. Once you've put them there, then type
rehashNow do the following in the Terminal:
mkdir .getmailFollow the instructions in the Getmail text files. There is one which gives examples of what goes into getmailrc.
cd .getmail
pico getmailrc
cd ~Once there, do this:
mkdir mailWhen Pine is open, navigate to the Setup/Configuration section and enter the full pathname of the inbox.mbox file you just created, where it says "inbox-path" --
cd mail
touch inbox.mbox
cd ~
pine
/Users/xxxx/mail/inbox.mboxThe same location will be specified in Getmail's rc file. Quit Pine.
getmail.pyAnd your mail will be retrieved -- assuming you set it up correctly. Then open Pine again and enjoy a different way of using email.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20010731175657687