If you get the most recent build of pine (I recommend fink install pine-ssl), you can access your mac.com email via IMAP and be protected by SSL -- at least, some of the time. Between pine's SSL implementation and Apple's mail.mac.com server, you'll only get a connection half the time. I don't know who's to blame. Here's what you do:
From the pine main menu, hit 'S' for Setup and 'C' for Config. Use the down-arrow to move down to inbox-path and hit 'C' to Change the value to this:
{mail.mac.com/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=username}INBOXOf course change username to your mac.com email address username.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2002102805213861