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Alpine with CSAIL IMAP

Using Alpine with CSAIL IMAP

(Alpine is a modern reimplementation of the older, inconveniently licensed Pine terminal-based email client. This configuration should work equivalently if you’re using the older Pine client.)

On CSAIL Ubuntu shared login servers like login.csail.mit.edu PINE is already installed and configured for use with the CSAIL IMAP server, and should not require any further configuration.

On all other systems, use the lines below in your ~/.pinerc file (slightly updated early 2021), adjusting $YOU and $YOUR_NAME as appropriate:

personal-name=$YOUR_NAME
user-domain=csail.mit.edu
inbox-path={imap.csail.mit.edu/tls/novalidate-cert/user=$YOU}INBOX
folder-collections="CSAIL IMAP" {imap.csail.mit.edu/tls/novalidate-cert/user=$YOU}INBOX.[]
default-fcc={imap.csail.mit.edu/tls/novalidate-cert/user=$YOU}INBOX.Sent
separate-folder-and-directory-entries
quell-empty-directories
smtp-server=outgoing.csail.mit.edu:587/tls/novalidate-cert/user=$YOU

These instructions assume CSAIL IMAP is the only email account you check via PINE, and will require modification otherwise.
Make sure to replace $YOU with your username @csail.mit.edu, and similarly for your full name.

Tips:

To avoid having to type your password every time, touch .pine-passfile in your home directory (and let alpine do the rest). (This only works with Alpine, not Pine proper.)