Alpine (email client)

Last updated
Alpine
Developer(s)
  • University of Washington (2007–2009)
  • re-alpine group (2009–2012)
  • Eduardo Chappa (2013–present)
Initial releaseDecember 20, 2007;16 years ago (2007-12-20)
Stable release
2.26 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 2 June 2022
Repository repo.or.cz/alpine.git
Written in C
Predecessor Pine
Available inEnglish
Type Email client
License Apache-2.0
Website alpineapp.email
Alpine's message index screen, showing its support for Unicode characters, in this case Simplified Chinese characters. Alpine email client.png
Alpine's message index screen, showing its support for Unicode characters, in this case Simplified Chinese characters.

Alpine is a free software email client developed at the University of Washington.

Contents

Alpine is a rewrite of the Pine Message System that adds support for Unicode and other features. Alpine is meant to be suitable for both inexperienced email users and the most demanding of power users. Alpine can be learned by exploration and the use of context-sensitive help. The user interface can be customized.

Features

Alpine shares many common features of console applications, like a rich set of shortcut keys, using a keyboard instead of a mouse for all navigation and operations. In fact, all operations in Alpine have corresponding shortcut keys.

Unlike other console applications targeting developers and experienced users, which often require users to edit a configuration file, Alpine lets users change most configuration options within the software. This makes alpine one of the most easy to learn console-based email clients.

Alpine supports IMAP, POP, SMTP, NNTP and LDAP protocols natively. Although it does not support composing HTML email, it can display emails that only have HTML content as text. Alpine can read and write to folders in several formats, including Maildir, mbox, the mh format used by the mh message handling system, mbx, and MIX.

Alpine includes its own editor Pico (Pico stands for PIne COmposer), which includes commands for basic editing of files, such as, search and replace, spelling, and justifying of text, besides cut and paste, and intuitive navigation commands. However, any editor can be used to compose messages in Alpine, using the Editor configuration variable.

Besides being able to set up an alternative editor, users can configure more than a hundred variables and options to their liking, including setting up configuration for sending and receiving e-mail from different services, through an Incoming Folders collection and the use of personalities (called roles in Alpine), and therefore a user can share the same address book between different accounts. Alpine can also sort individual folders by several criteria, including threading, original sender, recipient, and size. Alpine also allows users to configure colors, filters, scores, and character set of the display among others. The configuration and address books can be saved locally or on a remote IMAP server where they are accessible from different computers. Alpine also handles encrypted and signed messages using the S/MIME standard.

Although Alpine was designed to be accessible to beginners, it can easily be set up for more advanced users. All screens in Alpine include built-in help, which can quickly be accessed with the CTRL-G command.

History

University of Washington

Alpine 1.0 was publicly released on December 20, 2007.

On 4 August 2008, the UW Alpine team announced [2] that after one more release, incorporating Web Alpine 2.0, they would "shift [their] effort from direct development into more of a consultation and coordination role to help integrate contributions from the community." This was taken to mean that UW no longer maintains Alpine, [3] and left development to others.

re-alpine fork

In June 2009, a project named re-alpine was created on SourceForge. [4] This was used as an upstream for patches from maintainers. [5] In August 2013, the re-alpine project official announced the December 21, 2012, release of Re-alpine 2.03, their last official release. [6]

Current

Since January 2013, Eduardo Chappa, an active software developer formerly from the University of Washington, has released newer versions of Alpine from his site. His announcement was made public on the Usenet newsgroup comp.mail.pine. [7] [8] Most major Unix-like systems currently use this as the primary upstream site. [9] [10] [11] [12] On March 17, 2017, Chappa announced the release of version 2.21. [13] Version 2.22 was released on January 19, 2020. [14] Version 2.23 was released on June 19, 2020. [15] Version 2.24 was released on October 10, 2020. [16] Version 2.25 was released on September 18, 2021. [17]

The latest stable released version, 2.26, was released on June 2, 2022 [18] while the most recent developmental version, 2.25.1, was released on December 3, 2021. [19]

Name

"Alpine" officially stands for Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email. [20] UW has also referred to it as "Apache Licensed Pine". [21]

License

Alpine is licensed under the Apache License (version 2 – November 29, 2006), and saw its first public alpha release December 20, 2007. [22] [23] This milestone was a new approach, since the alpha test of Pine was always non-public.

See also

Related Research Articles

In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by RFC 9051.

In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, it is one of the most common protocols for email retrieval.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pine (email client)</span> Email and newsgroups client

Pine is a freeware, text-based email client which was developed at the University of Washington. The first version was written in 1989, and announced to the public in March 1992. Source code was available for only the Unix version under a license written by the University of Washington. Pine is no longer under development, and has been replaced by the Alpine client, which is available under the Apache License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email client</span> Computer program used to access and manage a users email

An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Outlook</span> Email and calendaring software

Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft 365 software suites. Though primarily being popular as an email client for businesses, Outlook also includes functions such as calendaring, task managing, contact managing, note-taking, journal logging, web browsing, and RSS news aggregation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gnus</span>

Gnus, or Gnus Network User Services, is a message reader which is part of GNU Emacs. It supports reading and composing both e-mail and news and can also act as an RSS reader, web processor, and directory browser for both local and remote filesystems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sylpheed</span>

Sylpheed is an open-source e-mail client and news client licensed under GNU GPL-2.0-or-later with the library part LibSylph under GNU LGPL-2.1-or-later. It provides easy configuration and an abundance of features. It stores mail in the MH Message Handling System. Sylpheed runs on Unix-like systems such as Linux or BSD, and it is also usable on Windows. It uses GTK+.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mozilla Thunderbird</span> Free and open-source email client by Mozilla

Mozilla Thunderbird is free and open-source email client software which also functions as a full personal information manager with a calendar and contactbook, as well as an RSS feed reader, chat client (IRC/XMPP/Matrix), and news client. Available cross-platform, it is operated by the Mozilla Foundation's subsidiary MZLA Technologies Corporation. Thunderbird is an independent, community-driven project that is managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird Community. The project strategy was originally modeled after that of Mozilla's Firefox web browser and is an interface built on top of that web browser.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mutt (email client)</span> Text-based email client for Unix-like systems

Mutt is a text-based email client for Unix-like systems. It was originally written by Michael Elkins in 1995 and released under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pegasus Mail</span> Proprietary email client

Pegasus Mail is a proprietary email client for Microsoft Windows. It was originally released in 1990 on NetWare networks with MS-DOS and later Apple Macintosh clients, before being ported to Windows which is now the only platform actively supported. Since its inception it has been developed by David Harris and is donationware after having previously been freeware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Opera Mail</span>

Opera Mail is the email and news client developed by Opera Software. It was an integrated component within the Opera web browser from version 2 through 12. With the release of Opera 15 in 2013, Opera Mail became a separate product and is no longer bundled with Opera. Opera Mail version 1.0 is available for OS X and Windows. It features rich text support and inline spell checking, spam filtering, a contact manager, and supports POP3 and IMAP, newsgroups, and Atom and RSS feeds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SquirrelMail</span> Software project

SquirrelMail is a project that aims to provide both a web-based email client and a proxy server for the IMAP protocol.

The following tables compare general and technical features of notable email client programs.

The Internet Messaging Program or IMP is a webmail client. It can be used to access e-mail stored on an IMAP server. IMP is written in PHP and a component of the collaborative software suite Horde.

The UW IMAP server was the reference server implementation of the Internet Message Access Protocol. It was developed at the University of Washington by Mark Crispin and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Live Mail</span> Email client, electronic calendar and newsreader, developed by Microsoft

Windows Live Mail is a discontinued freeware email client from Microsoft. It was the successor to Windows Mail in Windows Vista, which was the successor to Outlook Express in Windows XP and Windows 98. Windows Live Mail is designed to run on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but is also compatible with Windows 8 and Windows 10, even though Microsoft bundles a new email client, named Windows Mail, with the latter. In addition to email, Windows Live Mail also features a calendar, an RSS feed reader, and a Usenet newsreader.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outlook.com</span> Microsoft webmail service

Outlook.com, formerly Hotmail, is a free personal email service offered by Microsoft. This includes a webmail interface featuring mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. Outlook can also be accessed via email clients using the IMAP or POP protocols.

EmailTray is a lightweight email client for the Microsoft Windows operating system. EmailTray was developed by Internet Promotion Agency S.A., a software development d.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mail (Windows)</span> Conflation of two applications developed by Microsoft

Mail is an email client developed by Microsoft and included in Windows Vista and later versions of Windows. It is available as the successor to Outlook Express, which was either included with, or released for Internet Explorer 3.0 and later versions of Internet Explorer. It is set to be replaced by Outlook for Windows.

References

  1. ↑ Eduardo Chappa (2 June 2022). "New version 2.26".
  2. ↑ Steve Hubert (2011-08-04). "alpine status". Archived from the original on 2014-07-28. Retrieved 2012-01-04.
  3. ↑ Mark Crispin (2009-08-03). "Re-Alpine 2.01 released" . Retrieved 2012-01-04.
  4. ↑ "re-alpine: The continuation of the Alpine email client from University of Washington" . Retrieved 2012-01-04.
  5. ↑ "Change log for "alpine" package in Debian - 2.02-1" . Retrieved 2012-10-31.
  6. ↑ Levstik, Andraž (2013-08-14). "Re-alpine 2.03 release (late but still)". Alpine-info mailing list.
  7. ↑ Chappa, Eduardo (2015-01-15). "Alpine 2.20 released!". USENET: comp.mail.pine. Retrieved 2015-02-10– via Google Groups.
  8. ↑ "Patches for Alpine". Eduardo Chappa. Retrieved 10 February 2015.
  9. ↑ "alpine - Text-based email client, friendly for novices but powerful". Fedora package db. Fedora Project. Archived from the original on 26 November 2014. Retrieved 25 November 2014.
  10. ↑ "alpine - Text-based email client, friendly for novices but powerful". Debian Package Tracking System. Debian . Retrieved 22 April 2018.
  11. ↑ "alpine Makefile". FreeBSD ports tree. FreeBSD . Retrieved 25 November 2014.
  12. ↑ "alpine Makefile". OpenBSD ports tree. OpenBSD . Retrieved 25 November 2014.
  13. ↑ Chappa, Eduardo (2017-03-17). "Alpine 2.21 Released". USENET: comp.mail.pine– via Google Groups.
  14. ↑ Chappa, Eduardo (2020-01-19). "Initial release of Alpine version 2.22". Alpine/Pico/Pilot/Web Alpine/Imapd Distribution.
  15. ↑ Chappa, Eduardo (2020-06-19). "Release of version 2.23". Alpine/Pico/Pilot/Web Alpine/Imapd Distribution.
  16. ↑ Chappa, Eduardo (2020-10-10). "New version 2.24". Alpine/Pico/Pilot/Web Alpine/Imapd Distribution.
  17. ↑ Chappa, Eduardo (2021-09-18). "New version 2.25". Alpine/Pico/Pilot/Web Alpine/Imapd Distribution.
  18. ↑ Chappa, Eduardo (2022-06-02). "New version 2.26". Alpine/Pico/Pilot/Web Alpine/Imapd Distribution.
  19. ↑ Chappa, Eduardo (2021-12-03). "New version 2.25.1". Alpine/Pico/Pilot/Web Alpine/Imapd Distribution.
  20. ↑ "Alpine Messaging System--What is...?". 2009-03-06. Archived from the original on 2015-09-29. Retrieved 2013-07-29.
  21. ↑ "README.FIRST". UW Technology Anonymous FTP Server. University of Washington . Retrieved 25 November 2014.[ permanent dead link ]
  22. ↑ Ryan Barrett (2006-11-30). "Announcing Alpine 0.8". Archived from the original on 2012-01-22. Retrieved 2012-01-04.
  23. ↑ "UW Alpine download directory". University of Washington. Retrieved 2012-01-04.[ permanent dead link ]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.