Using Pine

Pine is a menu program which will allow you to receive and send e-mail from your domain via a telnet window. It is relatively user-friendly, but here are some tips to help you get started with it.

Step 1: Opening Pine and Reading Your E-mail

Bring up a telnet window and put yourdomain.com for the host name (Note: yourdomain.com is going to have your actual domain name substituted). Once at your login prompt, enter your user name and your password.

At the command prompt, type: pine

The first time you run Pine, you will see that it is creating your folders and directories to store your mail. When it has finished that, you will be presented with 'greeting text' which will welcome you to the program, tell you how to see al of the options available, and some required 'legal stuff.' You can hit <return> to have your usage of Pine be tallied by the team who developed it, as described in the greeting text, or you can hit E to exit the greeting and go into your main menu.

Your main menu will appear with "Select Folder - Select a Folder To View" selected as default.

Step 2: Reading Mail

With "Select Folder - Select a Folder To View" selected, hit return.

You will see your folders and "INBOX" will be selected. Hit to see the contents of your In Box, in a window titled Message Index. All of your new messages will have the letter N to the left of them.

Using the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard, you can scroll up and down the list of messages. When you see a message you want to read, select it and hit <Return> to read it.

If the message is longer than one screen, hit your spacebar to scroll forward. If you want to go backwards, hit your - key to scroll backwards.

Step 3: Reply

To reply to a message, simply select the message you wish to reply to, hit Return, and then type r for Reply. You will be prompted "Include original message in reply?" Type y if you would like to, or n if you do not wish to include the original message. You will also be prompted as to whether or not you want to reply to all of the recipients or not. Enter y or n to indicate your choice.

Note: If you choose to include the original message, it will be in the body of the reply with a > character at the start of each line. This makes it possible for you to reply to different parts of the message and the sender will see what he/she commented or asked and you can answer and he or she will be able to tell the difference between the inquiry and your response.

If you wish to cut parts of the lines out, scroll down to the line(s) you wish to delete and hold down the Control and hit k. This will cut (kut) that line out in its entirety.

Enter your reply by typing it in.

Step 4: Sending Your Reply

Once you have finished your reply, hold down the Control key and hit x. You will be prompted "Send message? [y/n]" If you are ready to send it, type y.

Composing a New E-mail Message

Go to your main menu by typing M for main menu.

Type C for Compose Message. You will see your Message Composition Screen. Type in the person's e-mail you are sending it to in the To: field, hit Return to fill in the other fields, and then type your message. Note: To add multiple recipients, you'll need to separate the e-mail addresses with commas.

To send, hold down the Control key and hit x.

Deleting Mail

It is advisable to delete your e-mail if you are finished reading it and you don't need to keep it.

From your Main Menu, select "Folder List - Select a Folder to View" and hit Return. Hit return on your In Box to see the message index.

You will see your list of messages once again. To mark the messages you don't wish to keep for deletion, use your arrow keys to scroll up and down and once you have selected a message to delete, type d for delete. You will see the letter D appear to the left of that message. If you have accidently marked a message for deletion which you didn't mean to, you may type the letter u to undelete it.

When you quit the Pine program, it will delete the messages you have marked for deletion, but only when you quit the Pine program.

Ending Your Pine Session

When you are finished with your e-mail, go to the main menu and type Q for quit. It will ask you, "really quit Pine?" if you have marked messages for deletion, it will ask you if you wish to expunge those messages marked for deletion. If you are sure, type y. You will be returned to the command prompt.

Error Message: Another Pine is Accessing This Mailbox. Session is Read-only

This indicates that another mail program is accessing your e-mail account. This could be another Pine telnet window you have possibly open, or perhaps your windows-based e-mail program is going out on its timed interval to check your mail while you are logged in.

At this point, you won't be able to delete any of your mail messages since the session is read only.