Use Pine to read Mail.app mail

Aug 01, '03 09:29:00AM

Contributed by: macubergeek

At work I read my work-related email email using Eudora. At home, I pull my home email from three POP accounts using Mail. I've always wanted to read my home email from work, and respond to my home email using my home POP accounts. Problem is, my POP accounts won't let me do that unless I'm on their network, or authenticated into their network, so my work Eudora was out of the question.

To be able to read my home email at home, and respond thru my home ISP mail servers, I had this convoluted setup where I SSHed to my Mac at home, and pulled the mail off the POP servers using Fetchmail or Charles Cazabon's excellant getmail Python script. The script would pull down the mail and I'd then read it using Pine.

Now this worked fine, but I was bored one day and decided to re-read the Pine FAQ and discovered that you can use Pine as a POP client much the same way as you'd use Mail or Eudora. You want to read the section marked "I have multiple email addresses. How do I read them all using Pine?"

Now you might be asking why should I care to do this? Well simply if you are on a wireless connection out in the world, or out of town and using another network connection, your home-ISP should allow you to collect your email off their mail server, but not send/respond to email thru their mail servers if you aren't on their network. This is part of the fight ISPs are waging against spammers. Additionally, you might not want to pull your mail over an insecure network because someone else might be able to intercept it and read it.

Instead, you SSH to your Mac at home, and pull/read your email from there using Pine. Your email information is encrypted when transversing the insecure network you are on, plus you can now send/respond to mail thru your usual ISP's mail servers.

[robg adds: We have had a couple independent hints on using Pine with Mail; this seems to be another method of doing so...]

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