Pine (e-mail client)

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Pine

Pine 4.61's main menu under Mac OS X
Developer:	University of Washington
Latest release:	4.64 / September 28, 2005
OS:	Unix, Windows
Use:	E-mail client
License:	Freeware
Website:	washington.edu/pine

Pine is a powerful freeware text-based e-mail client: the University of Washington's mail user agent (Email client) its name being an acronym for: "Program for Internet News & Email" (or "PINE Is Nolonger Elm" if you so prefer.) Originally written for inexperienced users, Pine's basic features are generally very easy to use. Later versions of Pine have many advanced features including an increasing number of configuration and preference options.

Pine is capable of efficiently organizing and archiving email. For instance, it offers the file carbon copy (FCC) option, in which e-mails to and from a specified address can be saved in a file that stores only those emails. This allows the creation of a file for each contact person that contains all of his or her e-mails with very little effort. The messages in this file can be sorted, viewed, and searched quickly.

1 Supported platforms
2 Acronym
3 License controversy
4 Alpine
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Supported platforms

There are both Unix and Windows versions of Pine. The Unix version is text user interface based—its message editor inspired the text editor Pico. WebPine is available to individuals associated with the university (students, faculty, etc.)—a version of Pine implemented as a web application. WebPine has several interesting characteristics, including:

Ease of use: at the cost of fewer advanced features compared to its Unix and Windows counterparts
Accessibility: only requires a web browser and proper university credentials

[edit] Acronym

Many people believe that Pine stood for "Pine is not Elm." However, one of its original authors, Laurence Lundblade, insists this was never the case and that it started off simply as a word and not an acronym, and that his first choice of a backronym for pine would be "Pine Is Nearly Elm". Over time it was changed by the university to mean Program for Internet News and E-mail. ^[1]

[edit] License controversy

Up to version 3.9.1, the Pine license was BSD-like, and it stated that

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee to the University of Washington is hereby granted...

The University did, however, register a trademark for the name Pine.

From version 3.9.2, the holder of the copyright, the University of Washington, changed the license so that even if the source code was still available, they did not allow modifications and changes to Pine be distributed by other than themselves. They also claimed that even the old licence never allowed distribution of modified versions. The trademark for the Pine name was part of their position in this matter (i.e. since they owned the name Pine, they essentially controlled anything represented by that name).^[2]

As a reaction to this GNU initiated development of a forked version of Pine, based on the 3.9.1 version, but under another name, MANA, to avoid the trademark issue. University of Washington reacted by threatening to sue the Free Software Foundation for distributing modified Pine, and GNU never officially released the MANA. GNU did, however, use it as a means of pressure against University of Washington and the university later modified their license somewhat to comply with some of the requirements of a free software license.^[3]

[edit] Alpine

In the summer of 2006, the University of Washington announced a new family of email tools based upon Pine, to be called Alpine. Alpine will be licensed under the Apache License, version 2. However, Alpine is currently still under development.^[4]

The first public pre-release of Alpine was on November 29, 2006.