Pine, which stands for a Program for Internet News & Email, was the first e-mail client that I ever used (way back in 1993 at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology when I was incoming Freshman). Call me nostalgic, but I still love the program. Now days, I use Evolution for e-mail, but when I am away from the office, I find it easiest to still login to my server via ssh and run pine to take a quick look at incoming e-mail (especially if I am half way around the world). It has served me extremely well over the years, which is why I still like installing it. Unfortunately, it can no longer be found in Fedora Extras, but the Livna repository has it, so we'll make an exception to not using Livna and install it via yum:
~>
sudo yum install pine --enablerepo livna
Press 'y' when
prompted to install the programs and any additional dependencies. After it is installed, source your ~/.tcshrc
file: ~>
source ~/.tcshrc
You are now ready to launch pine: ~>
pine &
Before you do so, however, you
may want to change a few things first, such as the permissions for /var/spool/mail
to 1777: ~>
sudo chmod 1777 /var/spool/mail
This needs to be done to set
the sticky bit on the directory so that files within it may be unlinked
or renamed only by root
or their owner. Without the sticky bit, anyone that is able to
write to the directory can delete or rename files. (The sticky
bit is commonly found on directories, such as /tmp, that
are world-writable.) If the sticky bit is not set, pine will
complain every time you launch the program. Basically, unless all of
your pine
users are in the mail group (this would be bad, because then anyone can
read/delete another's mail), or pine is sgid
mail (again, hopefully not), the pine users
will not be able to write to /var/spool/mail
with the current configuration. This poses a problem for pine,
because it cannot write a lock file to that directory, meaning that
other processes may update the user's mail file at the same time pine does,
usually a recipe for corruption or disappearing mail of some
sort. pine
will run without being able to acquire a lock on the mail spool
directory, but just be aware of the possibilities for damage. But
again, it complains a lot about it when doing so.With a chmod 1777 /var/spool/mail, pine will be able to write the required lock file so that only one process is updating the mailbox at a time. The 777 is so everyone can write files, but the leading 1 is so only the owner of the file in the directory can remove the file, even though everyone can write to the directory. 1777, therefore, is what we want.
After the permissions on /var/spool/mail are set, I have some very specific configuration preferences, which are listed below:
Configuration Preferences in pine
user-domain
= [domain].[name]
[X] compose-cancel-confirm-uses-yes
[X] quell-dead-letter-on-cancel
[X] spell-check-before-sending
[X] enable-reply-indent-string-editing
[X] include-attachments-in-reply
[X] include-header-in-reply
[X] include-text-in-reply
[X] reply-always-uses-reply-to
[X] warn-if-blank-subject
[X] enable-mouse-in-xterm
customized-hdrs = From: [Name] <[e-mail name]@[domain].[name]>
use-only-domain-name = Yes
Once the above changes are
implemented (type S-C to enter
into configuration options after launching the
program), pine
is now ready for use![X] compose-cancel-confirm-uses-yes
[X] quell-dead-letter-on-cancel
[X] spell-check-before-sending
[X] enable-reply-indent-string-editing
[X] include-attachments-in-reply
[X] include-header-in-reply
[X] include-text-in-reply
[X] reply-always-uses-reply-to
[X] warn-if-blank-subject
[X] enable-mouse-in-xterm
customized-hdrs = From: [Name] <[e-mail name]@[domain].[name]>
use-only-domain-name = Yes