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Email service on pangea ends on Nov 1, 2007.
Information on this page is only valid until that date, for accounts
that have not yet switched to another service.
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| Using pine to: |
These web pages are written specifically to describe use of the pine program to read and send email on pangea. Pine may be setup differently on other systems! For example, on the central Stanford UNIX systems (elaine, cardinal, bramble, etc), pine acts as a POP client and downloads all email from your @stanford.edu inbox into local files in AFS space. As a result, for the central Stanford UNIX systems, pine does not interoperate with other email clients, as it does on pangea.
Pine is a simple mail processing program recommended for reading and sending email from pangea.
Pine allows you to read and store your email on the pangea server, accessible anywhere in the world with a simple command line login. However, to avoid possible capture of your password by hackers, you must use an encrypted login method such as ssh.
Pine uses a full-screen, menu-driven interface; it displays all possible commands on the screen so you don't have to remember them; and it has built-in help information.
Pine understands basic HTML formatting in email messages and tries to display formats such as bold or underlined text. It lets you follow URL links in email, but uses the text-only lynx browser program on pangea to show the web page. You can also cut and paste the URL from pine into a normal graphical web browser. Pine cannot show in-line graphic images embedded in your email.
Pine understands MIME extensions; it can decode and save files attached to email. Often, however, those files are created with personal computer programs (such as Microsoft Word or Excel), and you must download the saved attachment from pangea's disk to a personal computer in order to read it.
Pine has a full range of email management and formatting features, many of which are customizable from a Setup screen. You can create aliases and mailing lists in a address book. You can use filtering rules to automatically sort incoming mail into separate folders by subject, correspondent, spam rating, etc. You can print any message. Folders can be sorted by date, subject, sender, thread, etc.
Pine is compatible with the IMAP service on pangea. Your email INBOX and all saved email folders on pangea are accessible with either pine or a personal computer program such as Eudora that is configured to use the IMAP protocol. But, don't try to use pine and your IMAP client simultaneously or messages may be corrupted.
Pine stores your saved email folders in the mail subdirectory of your pangea home directory. The total amount of saved email that you can store is limited by the pangea file system rules. If you receive large quantities of email with large attachments, and you wish to save them all in email folders, you will find that storage space on pangea is insufficient and you should consider using a personal computer based email program with the POP protocol (use of the IMAP protocol will run into the same storage limit on pangea).
Pine stores entire folders of messages in pangea's system memory at once, so it can slow down as the size of your email INBOX folder grows. If you abide by the pangea email guidelines and keep no more than 100 megabytes of incoming email in your INBOX, or any individual saved mail folder (except for brief periods when you are out of town), you should not experience any problems using pine.
The remaining pages in this section comprise a brief tutorial for the basic features of pine. To learn more about advanced features, such as folder management, address books, email filtering, personal configuration, etc., see the context-sensitive online help available for every pine screen when you are running the program, and the complete pine documentation on the Internet. Pangea is running version 4.58 of pine.
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