/etc/pine.conf
or /etc/pine.conf.fixed.
(Actually, these files can be changed using the configure arguments
--with-system-pinerc=VALUE or --with-system-fixed-pinerc=VALUE.)
The location of the pine.conf file can be changed with the -P command line
argument.
Both Alpine
and PC-Alpine also use personal (user-based) configuration files.
On UNIX machines, the personal configuration file is the
file ~/.pinerc.
For PC-Alpine systems, the personal configuration file is in
$PINERC or <PineRC registry value> or
${HOME}\ALPINE\PINERC or
<ALPINE.EXE dir>\PINERC.
Or the personal configuration file can be specified with the -p command
line argument.
All of these configuration files, other than the fixed system
config pine.conf.fixed on UNIX systems, may optionally
be remote configuration files instead of local files.
This is discussed further in the following section and in
Remote Configuration.
After the personal configuration, Alpine may optionally use
a personal exceptions configuration file which is specified with the
command line option "-x exceptions_config".
"Exceptions_config" may also be either a local file or a remote
configuration folder.
For Unix Alpine, if you don't have a "-x" command line option,
Alpine will look for the file ".pinercex"
in the same local directory that the regular config file is located in.
If the regular config file is remote then Unix Alpine looks in the home
directory for ".pinercex".
For PC-Alpine, if you don't have a "-x" command line option,
PC-Alpine will use the value of the
environment variable $PINERCEX.
If that is not set, PC-Alpine will look for
the local file "PINERCEX"
in the same local directory that the regular config file is located in.
If the regular config file is remote then PC-Alpine looks in the
local directory specfied by the "-aux local_directory" command
line argument, or the directory ${HOME}\ALPINE, or
in <ALPINE.EXE directory>.
The syntax of a non-list configuration variable is this:
<variable> = <value>If the value is absent then the variable is unset. To set a variable to the empty value two double quotes (""). This is equivalent to an absent value except that it overrides any system-wide default value that may be set. Quotes may be used around any value. All values are strings and end at the end of the line or the closing quote. Leading and trailing space is ignored unless it is included in the quotes. There is one variable, use-only-domain-name, for which the only appropriate values are yes and no. That's because it is a variable from the early days of Alpine before features existed.
There is also a second type of variable, lists. A list is a comma-separated list of values. The syntax for a list is:
<variable> = <value> [, <value> , ... ]A list can be continued on subsequent lines by beginning the line with white-space. Both the per-user and global configuration files may contain comments which are lines beginning with a
#. For UNIX Alpine, there are five ways in which each variable can be set. In decreasing order of precedence they are:
If the variable is not set in any of those places, there is a default setting in the source code.
So, system-wide fixed settings always take precedence over command line flags, which take precedence over per-user exception settings, which take precedence over per-user settings, which take precedence over system-wide configuration settings. PC-Alpine has the same list, except that it does not use a system-wide fixed configuration file. This can be modified slightly by using inheritance, which is covered below.
You may get a sample/fresh copy of the system configuration file by running alpine -conf. The result will be printed on the standard output with very short comments describing each variable. (The online help in the Setup screens provides much longer comments.) If you need to fix some of the configuration variables, you would use the same template for the fixed configuration file as for the regular system-wide configuration file. (If it isn't clear, the purpose of the fixed configuration file is to allow system administrators to restrict the configurability of Alpine. It is by no means a bullet-proof method.) Alpine will automatically create the personal configuration file the first time it is run, so there is no need to generate a sample. Alpine reads and writes the personal configuration file occasionally during normal operation. Users will not normally look at their personal configuration file, but will use the Setup screens from within Alpine to set the values in this file. If a user does add additional comments to the personal configuration file they will be retained.
References to environment variables may be included in the Alpine
configuration files. The format is $variable or
${variable}. The character ~ will be expanded to the
$HOME environment variable.
For a more complete explanation of how environment variables work, see
the section
Using Environment Variables.
When environment variables are used for Alpine settings which take lists, you must have an environment variable set for each member of the list. That is, Alpine won't properly recognize an environment variable which is set equal to a comma-delimited list. It is OK to reference unset environment variables in the Alpine configuration file, which will expand to nothing.
You can use the command line option "-x config" to split your configuration into generic and exceptional pieces. Config may be either local or remote.
For most people, splitting the configuration information into two pieces is only going to be useful if the generic information is accessed remotely. If you already have a local pinerc file with settings you like you may find that the command Setup/RemoteConfigSetup will be useful in helping you convert to a remote configuration. The command line flag copy_pinerc may also be useful.
For configuration variables which are lists, like "smtp-server" or "incoming-folders", the inheritance mechanism makes it possible to combine the values of options from different configuration locations instead of replacing the value. Configuration Inheritance has more information about how inheritance is used.
This option is displayed as "Addressbook Sort Rule".
The matching is case-insensitive, so this would match any of User@example.com, user@Example.Com, or USER@EXAMPLE.COM as well.
If set, the option affects the behavior of the Reply command and the "+" symbol in the MESSAGE INDEX, which denotes that a message has been addressed specifically to you.
In the default INDEX display the personal name (or email address) of the person listed in the message's "From:" header field is usually displayed except when that address is yours or one of your alternate addresses. In that case you will usually see the name of the first person specified in the message's "To:" header field with the prefix "To: " prepended.
With respect to Reply, the reply-to-all option will exclude addresses listed here.
The feature copy-to-address-to-from-if-it-is-us is somewhat related to this option.
In addition to a list of actual addresses, you may use regular expressions (as used with egrep with the ignore case flag) to describe the addresses you want to match. Alpine will somewhat arbitrarily interpret your entry as a regular expression if it contains any of the characters *, |, +, ?, {, [, ^, $, or \. Otherwise, it will be treated literally. The feature disable-regular-expression-matching-for-alternate-addresses may be used to turn off regular expression processing regardless of whether or not special characters appear in the entry.
A description of how regular expressions work is beyond the scope of this help text, but some examples follow.
The entry
in the alt-addresses list would mean that any address with a domain name of example.com (such as fred@example.com or wilma@example.com) will be considered one of your alternate addresses. Strictly speaking, the dot in example.com ought to be escaped with a backslash, as in example\.com, and a dollar sign anchor ought to come at the end of the expression to prevent a match of example.com.org. Complicating things further, the dollar sign is special in the Alpine configuration (it signifies environment variable expansion) so the dollar sign should be doubled or backslash escaped for Alpine's sake. Quotes around the whole expression will not escape the dollar sign successfully. So this example should look like
The entry
would match fred3@example.com or fred17@example.com as well as fred@example.com.
You could match all addresses that look like fred+stuff@example.com for any value of stuff with the entry
Notice that you have to escape the plus sign with a backslash because plus is a special character in regular expressions. If you wanted to match plain fred as well as fred+stuff the expression
would do it, but it would be easier to just add fred@example.com as a separate entry.
One more example, a match of all first-level subdomains, is given by
Because the regular expression matching is based on an old library (hs_regex) the regular expressions might not work exactly as you expect, but they should be close.
This option is displayed as "Alternate Addresses".
Setting this value to zero will prevent display of the animations altogether.
The option busy-cue-spinner-only can be used to remove the randomness from this animated display.
This variable may be set to any of the following values:
where the color_number is an ASCII digit between 0 and 7. The numbers 0 through 7 should correspond to the colors black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and white. Some terminal emulators use a pre-ANSI scheme which swaps the colors blue and red and the colors yellow and cyan. This will cause the default colors to be different, but other than that things should work fine. There is also a 9th color available, the last one shown, which is the default color from the terminal emulator. When used as a background color some people refer to this color as "transparent", which is why the letters "TRAN" are shown in the color swatch of the SETUP COLOR screen. The foreground transparent color is shown as the color of the "TRAN" text. (The transparent color will not work correctly in a PC-Alpine configuration.) The escape sequences used to set the background colors are the same as for the foreground colors except a "4" replaces the "3".
Note: With the Tera Term terminal emulator this setting works well. You should also have the Tera Term "Full color" option turned OFF. You may find the "Full color" option in Tera Term's "Setup" menu, in the "Window" submenu.
where the color_number is an ASCII digit between 0 and 255. Background colors are the same with the 38 replaced with a 48. The numbers 0 through 15 are probably similar to the 16 color version above, then comes a 6x6x6 color cube, followed by 24 colors of gray. The terminal default (transparent) color is the 257th color at the bottom. Some terminal emulators will misinterpret these escape sequences causing the terminal to blink or overstrike characters or to do something else undesirable.
The PuTTY terminal emulator has an option called "Allow terminal to use xterm 256-colour mode" which allows PuTTY to work well with this 256-color setting.
There are two other possible color values which may be useful in some situations. In the color configuration screens there will sometimes be a color which has the label "NORM" inside its color swatch. If this is selected the corresponding foreground or background Normal Color will be used. Another similar color is the one that has the label "NONE" inside its color swatch. The meaning of this setting is that no color changing will be done. This NONE color is only useful in contexts where Alpine is already coloring the text some color other than the Normal Color. For example, if the Reverse Color is set then the current line in the MESSAGE INDEX will be colored. If one of the index symbols (for example, the Index-to-me Symbol) has the NONE color as its background then the symbol's foreground color will be used to draw the actual text but the background color will be the same as whatever the background color already was. The color values which end up in the configuration file for these special values are the 11-character words "norm-padded", "none-padded", and "transparent".
The normal default is "no-color".
Once you've turned on color you may set the colors of many objects on the screen individually. The Color Configuration section has more information, or you may just try it by running the "Setup" command and typing "K" for Kolor to enter the color configuration screen (Kolor instead of Color because C means Config). Most categories of color which Alpine supports are configurable there. Index line color is configured separately.
and another showing how you might set a Reply-To address
You may also set non-standard header values here. For example, you could add
or even
If you include a value after the colon then that header will be included in your outgoing messages unless you delete it before sending. If a header in the Customized-Headers list has only a tag but no value, then it will not be included in outgoing messages unless you edit a value in manually. For example, if
is in the list, then the Reply-To header will be available for editing but won't be included unless a value is added while in the composer.
It's actually a little more complicated than that. The values of headers that you set with the Customized-Headers option are defaults. If the message you are about to compose already has a value for a header, that value is used instead of a value from your Customized-Headers. For example, if you are Replying to a message the Subject field will already be filled in. In that case, if the Customized-Headers list contains a Subject line, the custom subject will NOT be used. The subject derived from the subject of the message you are Replying to will be used instead.
It is also possible to make header setting even more complicated and more automatic by using Roles, but if all you want to do is set a default value for a header, you don't need to think about Roles.
If you change your From address you may also find it useful to add the changed From address to the alt-addresses configuration option.
Limitation: Because commas are used to separate the list of Customized-Headers, it is not possible to have the value of a header contain a comma. Nor is there currently an "escape" mechanism provided to make this work.
This option is displayed as "Customized Headers".
If you set this option to a value higher than one, then that many copies of dead letter files will be saved. For example, if you set this option to "3" then you may have files named "DEADLETR", "DEADLETR2", and "DEADLETR3"; or "dead.letter", "dead.letter2", and "dead.letter3". In this example, the most recently cancelled message will be in "dead.letter", and the third most recently cancelled message will be in "dead.letter3". The fourth most recently cancelled message will no longer be saved.
If you set this option to zero, then NO record of canceled messages is maintained.
If the feature Quell-Dead-Letter-On-Cancel is set, that overrides whatever you set for this option. If this option had existed at the time, then the Quell feature would not have been added, but it is still there for backwards compatibility. So, in order for this option to have the desired effect, make sure the Quell feature is turned off.
Note that the "Newsgroups:" header will be abbreviated in the Composer display, but should be spelled out in full here.
This option is displayed as "Default Composer Headers".
This option is displayed as "Default Fcc (File carbon copy)".
This option is displayed as "Default Saved Message Folder".
Alpine matches its list of supported authenticators with the server to determine the most secure authenticator that is supported by both. If no matching authenticators are found, Alpine will revert to plaintext login (or, in the case of SMTP, will be unable to authenticate at all).
The candidates for disabling are listed below. There may be more if you compile Alpine with additional authenticators and/or a newer version of the c-client library.
Normally, you will not disable any authenticators. There are two exceptions:
It is never necessary to disable authenticators, since Alpine will try other authenticators before giving up. However, disabling the relevant authenticator avoids annoying error messages.
The mbox driver enables the following behavior: if there is a
file called mbox
in your home directory, and if that file is either empty or in Unix mailbox
format, then every time you open INBOX the mbox driver
will automatically transfer mail from the system mail spool directory into the
mbox file and
delete it from the spool directory. If you disable the mbox driver,
this will not happen.
It is not recommended to disable the driver which supports the system default mailbox format. On most non-SCO systems, that driver is the unix driver. On most SCO systems, it is the mmdf driver. The system default driver may be configured to something else on your system; check with your system manager for additional information.
It is most likely not very useful for you to disable any of the drivers other than possibly mbox. You could disable some of the others if you know for certain that you don't need them but the performance gain in doing so is very modest.
Display filters do not work with PC-Alpine.
The command is executed and the message is piped into its standard input. The standard output of the command is read back by Alpine. The _TMPFILE_ token (see below) overrides this default behavior.
The filter's use is based on the configured trigger string. The format of a filter definition is:
You can specify as many filters as you wish, separating them with a comma. Each filter can have only one trigger and command. Thus, two trigger strings which invoke the same command require separate filter specifications.
The trigger is simply text that, if found in the message, will invoke the associated command. If the trigger contains any space characters, it must be placed within quotes. Likewise, should you wish a filter to be invoked unconditionally, define the trigger as the null string, "" (two consecutive double-quote characters). If the trigger string is found anywhere in the text of the message the filter is invoked. Placing the trigger text within the tokens defined below changes where within the text the trigger must be before considering it a match.
Trigger Modifying Tokens:
The "command" and "arguments" portion is simply the command line to be invoked if the trigger string is found. Below are tokens that Alpine will recognize and replace with special values when the command is actually invoked.
Command Modifying Tokens:
The feature disable-terminal-reset-for-display-filters is related.
Performance caveat/considerations:
Testing for the trigger and invoking the filter doesn't come for free.
There is overhead associated with searching for the trigger string, testing
for the filter's existence and actually piping the text through the filter.
The impact can be reduced if the Trigger Modifying Tokens above are
employed.
Limitation:
If Header Colors are being used, the sequences of bytes which indicate
color changes will be contained in the text which is passed to the
display-filter.
If this causes problems you'll need to turn off Header Colors.
The thirteen bytes which indicate a color change are
the character \377 followed by
\010 for a foreground color or \011 for a background color.
Then comes eleven characters of RGB data which looks something like
255, 0,255, depending on the particular color, of course.
Normally, when a filename is supplied that lacks a leading "path" component, Alpine assumes the file exists in the user's home directory. Under Windows operating systems, this definition isn't always clear. This feature allows you to explictly set where Alpine should look for files without a leading path.
NOTE: this feature's value is ignored if either use-current-dir feature is set or the PINERC has a value for the operating-dir variable.
.MTX by default.
There are some situations where automatic new-mail checking does not work. For example, if a mail folder is opened using the POP protocol or a newsgroup is being read using the NNTP protocol, then new-mail checking is disabled.
It may be possible to check for new mail in these cases by reopening the folder. Alpine does not do this for you automatically, but you may do the commands manually to cause this to happen. You reopen by going back to the folder list screen from the message index screen with the "<" command, and then going back into the message index screen with the ">" command. (Actually, any method you would normally use to open a folder will work the same as the "<" followed by ">" method. For example, the GoTo Folder command will work, or you may use L to go to the Folder List screen and Carriage Return to reopen the folder.)
There are some cases where Alpine knows that reopening the folder should be useful as a way to discover new mail. At the time of this writing, connections made using the POP protocol, news reading using the NNTP protocol, local news reading, and local ReadOnly folders which are in the traditional UNIX or the MMDF format all fall into this category. There are other cases where it may be a way to discover new mail, but Alpine has no way of knowing, so it might also just be an exercise in futility. All remote, ReadOnly folders other than those listed just above fall into this category. The setting of this option together with the type of folder controls how Alpine will react to the apparent attempt to reopen a folder.
If you don't reopen, then you will just be back in the message index with no change. You left the index and came back, but the folder remained "open" the whole time. However, if you do reopen the folder, the folder is closed and then reopened. In this case, the current state of the open folder is lost. The New status, Important and Answered flags, selected state, Zoom state, collapsed or expanded state of threads, current message number, and any other temporary state is all lost when the reopen happens. For POP folders (but not NNTP newsgroups) the Deleted flags are also lost.
In the possibilities listed below, the text says "POP/NNTP" in several places. That really implies the case where Alpine knows it is a good way to discover new mail, which is more than just POP and NNTP, but POP and NNTP are the cases of most interest. This option probably has more possible values than it deserves. They are:
Remember, wherever it says POP or NNTP above it really means POP or NNTP or any of the other situations where it is likely that reopening is a good way to discover new mail.
There is an alternative that may be of useful in some situations. Instead of manually checking for new mail you can set up a Mail Drop and automatically check for new mail.
Nickname | Fullname | Addresswith optional whitespace in all the obvious places.
Setting this variable will alter Alpine's usual behavior when you execute the Compose command. Normally, Alpine offers a chance to continue a postponed or interrupted message should one or the other exist. When this variable is set to a folder name that exists, Alpine will also offer the chance to select a message from the folder to insert into the composer, much like when continuing a postponed message. The difference, however, is that Alpine will not automatically delete the selected message from the Form Letter Folder.
Setting this variable will also affect Alpine's behavior when you Postpone a message from the composer. Normally, Alpine simply stashes the message away in your Postponed-Folder. Regardless of the specified folder's existence, Alpine will ask which folder you intend the message to be stored in. Choose the "F" option to store the message in your Form Letter Folder. This is the most common way to add a message to the folder.
Another method of adding messages to the folder is via the Alpine composer's Fcc: field. If you are sending a message that you expect to send in the same form again, you can enter the Form Letter Folder's name in this field. Alpine, as usual, will copy the message as it's sent. Note, when you later select this message from your Form Letter Folder, it will have the same recipients as the original message.
To delete a message from the Form Letter Folder, you can either select the folder from a suitable FOLDER LIST screen, or use the Delete command in the MESSAGE INDEX offered when selecting from the folder as part of the Compose command. You can delete a Form Letter Folder just as any other folder from a suitable FOLDER LIST screen.
You may find that the Roles facility can be used to replace the Form Letter Folder.
If these are not path names, they will be in the default collection for Saves. Any valid folder specification, local or remote (via IMAP), is allowed. There is no default.
This option specifies, in seconds, how often Alpine will check for new mail and state changes in Incoming Folders when Incoming Folders Checking is turned on. The default is 3 minutes (180). This value applies only to folders that are local to the system that Alpine is running on or that are accessed using the IMAP protocol. The similar option incoming-check-interval-secondary applies to all other monitored folders.
This option together with the option incoming-check-interval specifies, in seconds, how often Alpine will check for new mail and state changes in Incoming Folders when Incoming Folders Checking is turned on. The default for this option is 3 minutes (180). For folders that are local to this system or that are accessed using the IMAP protocol the value of the option incoming-check-interval is used. For all other monitored folders, the value of this option is used.
The reason there are two separate options is because it is usually less expensive to check local and IMAP folders than it is to check other types, like POP or NNTP folders. You may want to set this secondary value to a higher number than the primary check interval.
When monitoring the Incoming Message Folders for Unseen messages Alpine will normally monitor all Incoming Folders. You may use this option to restrict the list of monitored folders to a subset of all Incoming Folders.
Sets the time in seconds that Alpine will attempt to open a network connection used for monitoring for Unseen messages in Incoming Folders. The default is 5. If a connection has not completed within this many seconds Alpine will give up and consider it a failed connection.
Alpine provides a pre-defined set of informational fields with reasonable column widths automatically computed. You can, however, replace this default set by listing special tokens in the order you want them displayed.
The list of available tokens is here.
Spaces are used to separate listed tokens. Additionally, you can specify how much of the screen's width the taken's associated data should occupy on the index line by appending the token with a pair of parentheses enclosing either a number or percentage. For example, "SUBJECT(13)" means to allocate 13 characters of space to the subject column, and "SUBJECT(20%)" means to allocate 20% of the available space to the subjects column, while plain "SUBJECT" means the system will attempt to figure out a reasonable amount of space.
There is always one space between every pair of columns, so if you use fixed column widths (like 13) you should remember to take that into account. Several of the fields are virtually fixed-width, so it doesn't make much sense to specify the width for them. The fields STATUS, FULLSTATUS, IMAPSTATUS, MSGNO, the DATE fields, SIZE, and DESCRIPSIZE all fall into that category. You may specify widths for those if you wish, but you're probably better off letting the system pick those widths.
The default is equivalent to:
This means that the four fields without percentages will be allocated first, and then 33% and 67% of the remaining space will go to the from and subject fields. If one of those two fields is specified as a percentage and the other is left for the system to choose, then the percentage is taken as an absolute percentage of the screen, not of the space remaining after allocating the first four columns. It doesn't usually make sense to do it that way. If you leave off all the widths, then the subject and from fields (if both are present) are allocated space in a 2 to 1 ratio, which is almost exactly the same as the default.
What you are most likely to do with this configuration option is to specify which fields appear at all, which order they appear in, and the percentage of screen that is used for the from and subject fields if you don't like the 2 to 1 default.
If you want to retain the default format that Pine 4.64 had, use
and set the feature Disable-Index-Locale-Dates.
Keywords may be used when Selecting messages (Select Keyword). Keywords may also be used in the Patterns of Rules (Filters, Indexcolors, etc). Filter rules may be used to set keywords automatically. Keywords may be displayed as part of the Subject of a message by using the SUBJKEY or SUBJKEYINIT tokens in the Index-Format option. The Keyword-Surrounding-Chars option may be used to modify the display of keywords using SUBJKEY and SUBJKEYINIT slightly. Keywords may also be displayed in a column of their own in the MESSAGE INDEX screen by using the KEY or KEYINIT tokens. It is also possible to color keywords in the index using the Setup/Kolor screen (Keyword Colors). Keywords are not supported by all mail servers.
You may give keywords nicknames if you wish. If the keyword definition you type in contains a SPACE character, then the actual value of the keyword is everything after the last SPACE and the nickname for that keyword is everything before the last SPACE. For example, suppose you are trying to interoperate with another email program which uses a particular keyword with an unpleasant name. Maybe it uses a keyword called
but for you that keyword means that the message is work-related. You could define a keyword to have the value
and then you would use the name "Work" when dealing with that keyword in Alpine. If you defined it as
the nickname would be everything before the last SPACE, that is the nickname would be "My Work".
Some commonly used keywords begin with dollar signs. This presents a slight complication, because the dollar sign is normally used to signify environment variable expansion in the Alpine configuration. In order to specify a keyword which begins with a dollar sign you must precede the dollar sign with a second dollar sign to escape its special meaning. For example, if you want to include the keyword
as one of your possible keywords, you must enter the text
instead.
and the SUBJKEYINIT token would look like
The default character before the keywords is the left brace ({) and the default after the keywords is the right brace followed by a space (} ).
This option allows you to change that. You should set it to two values separated by a space. The values may be quoted if they include space characters. So, for example, the default value could be specified explicitly by setting this option to
The first part wouldn't need to be quoted (but it doesn't hurt). The second part does need the quotes because it includes a space character. If you wanted to change the braces to brackets you could use
Inside the quotes you can use backslash quote to mean quote, so
would produce
It is also possible to color keywords in the index using the Setup/Kolor screen (Keyword Colors).
It is not possible to change the fact that a space character is used to separate the keywords if more than one keyword is set for a message. It is also not possible to change the fact that there are no separators between the keyword initials if more than one keyword is set.
This option is displayed as "Keyword Surrounding Characters".
Theserver_name[:port]"quoted stuff"
server_name is just a hostname and it is followed by
an optional colon and port number. The default port is 389.
Following the server name is a single SPACE character followed by
a bunch of characters inside double quotes. The part inside the quotes is
a set of tag = value pairs.
Each tag is preceded by a slash (/) and followed
by an equal sign. The value for that tag is the text up to the next slash.
An example of some quoted stuff is:
This would set the search base for this server to"/base=o=University of Washington, c=US/impl=0/.../nick=My Server"
o=University of Washington, c=US, set the implicit bit to zero,
and set the nickname for the server to My Server.
All of the tags correspond directly to items in the Setup/Directory screen
so experiment with that if you want to see what the possible tags and values
are.
This is simply a different way to store the signature data. The signature is stored inside your Alpine configuration file instead of in a separate signature file. Tokens contained in the signature work the same way they do with the regular signature-file.
The Setup/Signature command in Alpine's Main Menu will edit the literal-signature by default. However, if no literal-signature is defined and the file named in the signature-file option exists, then the latter will be used instead. Compose (Reply, Forward, ...) will default to using the literal-signature if defined, otherwise it will use the contents of the file named in signature-file.
The Alpine composer is used to edit the literal-signature. The result of that edit is first converted to a C-style string before it is stored in the configuration file. In particular, the two character sequence \n (backslash followed by the character "n") will be used to signify a line-break in the signature. You don't have to enter the \n, but it will be visible in the SETUP CONFIGURATION window after you are done editing the signature.
There are some situations where automatic new-mail checking does not work. See the discussion about new-mail checking in folder-reopen-rule.
The new-mail checking will not happen exactly at the frequency that you specify. For example, Alpine may elect to defer a non-INBOX mail check if you are busy typing. Or, it may check more frequently than you have specified if that is thought to be necessary to keep the server from closing the connection to the folder due to inactivity. If Alpine checks for new mail as a side effect of another command, it will reset the timer, so that new-mail checking may seem to happen irregularly instead of every X seconds like clockwork.
If you are anxious to know about new mail as soon as possible, set the check interval low, and you'll know about the new mail by approximately that amount of time after it arrives. If you aren't so worried about knowing right away, set this option to a higher value. That will save the server some processing time and may save you some of the time you spend waiting for new-mail checks to happen if you are dealing with a slow server or slow network connection.
If you suspect that new-mail checking is causing slow downs for you, you may want to look into the options Quell-Mailchecks-Composing-Except-Inbox, Quell-Mailchecks-Composing-Inbox and Mail-Check-Interval-Noncurrent, which refine when mail checking is done.
If the mailbox being check uses a Mail Drop then there is a minimum time (maildrop-check-minimum) between new-mail checks. Because of this minimum you may notice that new mail does not appear promptly when you expect it. The reason for this is to protect the server from over-zealous opening and closing of the Mail Drop folder, since that is a costly operation.
A side effect of disabling mail checking is that there will be situations in which the user's IMAP connection will be broken due to inactivity timers on the server. Another side effect is that the user-input-timeout option won't work.
Normally this option is set to zero, which means that the value used will be the same as the value for the "Mail-Check-Interval". If you set this option to a value different from zero (usually larger than the value for "Mail-Check-Interval") then that is the check interval that will be used for folders which are not the currently open folder or the INBOX. You may not even have any folders that are noncurrent and not the INBOX. If you do, it is likely that they are due to Stay-Open-Folders you have configured. This option also affects the rate of mail checking done on cached connections to folders you previously had open but are no longer actively using. You aren't expected to understand that last sentence, but if you are interested take a look at Max-Remote-Connections, and the related options.
This option specifies, in seconds, the minimum time between Mail Drop new-mail checks. You may want to set this minimum high in order to avoid experiencing some of the delays associated with the checks. Note that the time between checks is still controlled by the regular Mail-Check-Interval option. When Alpine is about to do an automatic check for new mail (because the Mail-Check-Interval has expired) then if the time since the last new-mail check of any open Mail Drops has been greater than the MailDrop-Check-Minimum, the Mail Drop is checked for new mail as well. Therefore, it is only useful to set this option to a value that is higher than the Mail-Check-Interval.
If this option is set to zero, automatic Mail Drop new-mail checking is disabled. There is a minimum value, normally 60 seconds. The default value is normally 60 seconds as well. This applies to the INBOX and to the currently open folder if that is different from the INBOX.
There are some time costs involved in opening and closing remote IMAP folders, the main costs being the time you have to wait for the connection to the server and the time for the folder to open. Opening a folder may involve not only the time the server takes to do its processing but time that Alpine uses to do filtering. These times can vary widely. They depend on how loaded the server is, how large the folder being opened is, and how you set up filtering, among other things. Once Alpine has opened a connection to a particular folder, it will attempt to keep that connection open in case you use it again. In order to do this, Alpine will attempt to use the Max-Remote-Connections (the value of this option) IMAP connections you have alloted for this purpose.
For example, suppose the value of this option is set to "2". If your INBOX is accessed on a remote server using the IMAP protocol, that doesn't count as one of the remote connections but it is always kept open. If you then open another IMAP folder, that would be your first remote connection counted as one of the Max-Remote-Connections connections. If you open a third folder the second will be left open, in case you return to it. You won't be able to tell it has been left open. It will appear to be closed when you leave the folder but the connection will remain in the background. Now suppose you go back to the second folder (the first folder after the INBOX). A connection to that folder is still open so you won't have to wait for the startup time to open it. Meanwhile, the connection to the third folder will be left behind. Now, if you open a fourth folder, you will bump into the Max-Remote-Connections limit, because this will be the third folder other than INBOX and you have the option set to "2". The connection that is being used for the third folder will be re-used for this new fourth folder. If you go back to the third folder after this, it is no longer already connected when you get there. You'll still save some time since Alpine will re-use the connection to the fourth folder and you have already logged in on that connection, but the folder will have to be re-opened from scratch.
If a folder is large and the startup cost is dominated by the time it takes to open that folder or to run filters on it, then it will pay to make the value of this option large enough to keep it open. On the other hand, if you only revisit a handful of folders or if the folders are small, then it might make more sense to keep this number small so that the reconnect time (the time to start up a new connection and authenticate) is eliminated instead.
You may also need to consider the impact on the server. On the surface, a larger number here may cause a larger impact on the server, since you will have more connections open to the server. On the other hand, not only will you be avoiding the startup costs associated with reopening a folder, but the server will be avoiding those costs as well.
When twenty five minutes pass without any active use of an IMAP connection being saved for possible re-use, that connection will be shut down,
This option is displayed as "Maximum Remote Connections".
You may have Alpine create a FIFO special file (also called a named pipe, see mkfifo(3) and fifo(4)) where it will send a one-line message each time a new message is received in the current folder, the INBOX, or any open Stay-Open-Folders. To protect against two different Alpines both writing to the same FIFO, Alpine will only create the FIFO and write to it if it doesn't already exist.
A possible way to use this option would be to have a separate window on your screen running the command
where "filename" is the name of the file given for this option. Because the file won't exist until after you start Alpine, you must first start Alpine and then run the "cat" command. You may be tempted to use "tail -f filename" to view the new mail log. However, the common implementations of the tail command will not do what you are hoping.
The width of the messages produced for the FIFO may be altered with the NewMail-Window-Width option.
On some systems, fifos may only be created in a local filesystem. In other words, they may not be in NFS filesystems. This requirement is not universal. If the system you are using supports it, it should work. (It is often the case that your home directory is in an NFS filesystem. If that is the case, you might try using a file in the "/tmp" filesystem, which is usually a local filesytem.) Even when it is possible to use an NFS-mounted filesystem as a place to name the fifo (for example, your home directory), it will still be the case that the reader (probably the "cat" command) and the writer (Alpine) of the fifo must be running on the same system.
This option is only useful if you have turned on the NewMail-FIFO-Path option. That option causes new mail messages to be sent to a fifo file. Those messages will be 80 characters wide by default. You can change the width of the messages by changing this option. For example, if you are reading those messages in another window you might want to set this width to the width of that other window.
For UNIX Alpine, this option is only useful if you have turned on the NewMail-FIFO-Path option. That option causes new mail messages to be sent to a fifo file. Those messages will be 80 characters wide by default. You can change the width of those messages by changing this option. For example, if you are reading those messages in another window you might want to set this width to the width of that other window.
If you are using PC-Alpine, it has an option in the Config menu to turn on the "New Mail Window". The present option also controls the width of that window.
/usr/lib/news/active.
/var/spool/news.
When you open a connection to a News server using the NNTP protocol, you normally have access to all of the articles in each newsgroup. If a server keeps a large backlog of messages it may speed performance some to restrict attention to only the newer messages in a group. This option allows you to set how many article numbers should be checked when opening a newsgroup. You can think of "nntp-range" as specifying the maximum number of messages you ever want to see. For example, if you only ever wanted to look at the last 500 messages in each newsgroup you could set this option to 500. In actuality, it isn't quite that. Instead, for performance reasons, it specifies the range of article numbers to be checked, beginning with the highest numbered article and going backwards from there. If there are messages that have been canceled or deleted their article numbers are still counted as part of the range.
So, more precisely, setting the "nntp-range" will cause article numbers
to be considered when reading a newsgroup. The number of messages that show up in your index will be less than or equal to the value of "nntp-range".
The purpose of this option is simply to speed up access when reading news. The speedup comes because Alpine can ignore all but the last nntp-range article numbers, and can avoid downloading any information about the ignored articles. There is a cost you pay for this speedup. That cost is that there is no way for you to see those ignored articles. The articles that come before the range you specify are invisible to you and to Alpine, as if they did not exist at all. There is no way to see those messages using, for example, an unexclude command or something similar. The only way to see those articles is to set this option high enough (or set it to zero) and then to reopen the newsgroup.
If this option is set to 0 (which is also the default), then the range is unlimited. This option applies globally to all NNTP servers and to all newsgroups on those servers. There is no way to set different values for different newsgroups or servers.
When you define an NNTP server, Alpine implicitly defines a news collection for you, assuming that server as the news server and assuming that you will use the NNTP protocol and a local newsrc configuration file for reading news. See also Configuring News.
Your NNTP server may offer NNTP "AUTHINFO SASL" or "AUTHINFO USER" authentication. It may even require it. If your NNTP server does offer such authentication you may specify a user name parameter to cause Alpine to attempt to authenticate. The same is true for the server name in a folder collection which uses NNTP. This parameter requires an associated value, the username identifier with which to establish the server connection. An example might be:
If authentication is offered by the server, this will cause Alpine to attempt to use it. If authentication is not offered by the server, this will cause Alpine to fail with an error similar to:
For more details about the server name possibilities see Server Name Syntax.
Use this option to set it to something different. The value must be quoted if it includes any space characters. For example, the default value could be specified explicitly by setting this option to
This option is displayed as "Opening Text Separator Characters".
This option is displayed as "Patterns Filters".
This option is displayed as "Patterns Scores".
/etc/passwd).
The easiest way to change the full From address is with the
customized-hdrs variable.
the correct value to use would be
There is an assumption here that your first collection is the folders in
Once a month, for each folder listed, Alpine will offer to move the contents of the folder to a new folder of the same name but with the previous month's date appended. Alpine will then look for any such date-appended folder names created for a previous month, and offer each one it finds for deletion.
If you decline the first offer, no mail is moved and no new folder is created.
The new folders will be created in your default folder collection.
Enable the feature Quote-Replace-Nonflowed to also have quote-replacement performed on non-flowed messages.
Setting this option will replace ">" and "> " with the new setting. This string may include trailing spaces. To preserve those spaces enclose the full string in double quotes.
No padding to separate the text of the message from the quote string is added. This means that if you do not add trailing spaces to the value of this variable, text will be displayed right next to the quote string, which may be undesirable. This can be avoided by adding a new string separated by a space from your selection of quote string replacement. This last string will be used for padding. For example, setting this variable to ">" " " has the effect of setting ">" as the quote-replace-string, with the text padded by a space from the last quote string to make it more readable.
One possible setting for this variable could be " " (four spaces wrapped in quotes), which would have the effect of indenting each level of quoting four spaces and removing the ">"'s. Different levels of quoting could be made more discernible by setting colors for quoted text.
Replying to or forwarding the viewed message will preserve the original formatting of the message, so quote-replacement will not be performed on messages that are being composed.
As a special case, if exactly one line of quoted text would be hidden, the entire quote will be shown instead. So for the above example, quoted text which is exactly six lines long will will be shown in its entirety. (In other words, instead of hiding a single line and adding a line that announces that one line was hidden, the line is just shown.)
If the sender of a message has carefully chosen the quotes that he or she includes, hiding those quotes may change the meaning of the message. For that reason, Alpine requires that when you want to set the value of this variable to something less than four lines, you actually have to set it to the negative of that number. So if you want to set this option to "3", you actually have to set it to "-3". The only purpose of this is to get you to think about whether or not you really want to do this! If you want to delete all quoted text you set the value of this option to the special value "-10".
The legal values for this option are
| 0 | Default, don't hide anything |
| -1,-2,-3 | Suppress quote lines past 1, 2, or 3 lines |
| 4,5,6,... | Suppress if more than that many lines |
| -10 | Suppress all quoted lines |
If you set this option to a non-default value you may sometimes wish to view the quoted text that is not shown. When this is the case, the HdrMode (Header Mode) command may be used to show the hidden text. Typing the "H" command once will show the hidden text. Typing a second "H" will also turn on Full Header mode. The presence or absence of the HdrMode command is determined by the "Enable-Full-Header-Cmd" Feature-List option in your Alpine configuration, so you will want to be sure that is turned on if you use quote suppression.
For the purposes of this option, a quote is a line that begins with the character ">".
Quotes are only suppressed when displaying a message on the screen. The entire quote will be left intact when printing or forwarding or something similar.
No matter what the value, the validity check is always done when the address book is about to be changed by the user. The check can be initiated manually by typing ^L (Ctrl-L) while in the address book maintenance screen for the remote address book.
This option specifies a different value for that string. If you wish to use a string which begins or ends with a space, enclose the string in double quotes.
Besides simple text, the prepended string can be based on the message being replied to. The following tokens are substituted for the message's corresponding value:
where the day of the week is only included if it is available in the original message. You can replace this default with text of your own. The text may contain tokens that are replaced with text that depends on the message you are replying to. For example, the default is equivalent to:
Since this variable includes regular text mixed with special tokens the tokens have to be surrounded by underscore characters. For example, to use the token "PREFDATE" you would need to use "_PREFDATE_", not "PREFDATE".
The list of available tokens is here.
By default, the text is all on a single line and is followed by a blank line. If your Reply-Leadin turns out to be longer than 80 characters when replying to a particular message, it is shortened. However, if you use the token
anywhere in the value, no end of line or blank line is appended, and no shortening is done. The _NEWLINE_ token may be used to get rid of the blank line following the text, to add more blank lines, or to form a multi-line Reply-Leadin. To clarify how _NEWLINE_ works recall that the default value is:
That is equivalent to
In the former case, two newlines are added automatically because no _NEWLINE_ token appears in the value of the option (for backwards compatibility). In the latter case, the newlines are explicit. If you want to remove the blank line that follows the Reply-Leadin text use a single _NEWLINE_ token like
Because of the backwards compatibility problem, it is not possible to remove all of the ends of lines, because then there will be no _NEWLINE_ tokens and that will cause the automatic adding of two newlines! If you want, you may embed newlines in the middle of the text, as well, producing a multi-line Reply-Leadin.
By default, no attempt is made to localize the date. If you prefer a localized form you may find that one of the tokens _PREFDATE_ or _PREFDATETIME_ is a satisfactory substitute. If you want more control one of the many other date tokens, such as _DATEISO_, might be better.
For the adventurous, there is a way to conditionally include text based on whether or not a token would result in specific replacement text. For example, you could include some text based on whether or not the _NEWS_ token would result in any newsgroups if it was used. It's explained in detail here.
In the very unlikely event that you want to include a literal token in the introduction line you must precede it with a backslash character. For example,
would produce something like
It is not possible to have a literal backslash followed by an expanded token.
imap).
/usr/ucb/rsh.
If this rule is set to last-folder-used, Alpine offers to Save to the folder you last successfully Saved a message to (this session). The first time you Save a message in a session, Alpine offers to Save the message to the default folder.
Choosing any of the by- options causes Alpine to attempt to get the chosen option's value for the message being Saved (or for the first message being Saved if using an aggregate Save). For example, if by-from is chosen, Alpine attempts to get the value of who the message came from (i.e. the from address). Alpine then attempts to Save the message to a folder matching that value. If by-from is chosen and no value is obtained, Alpine uses by-sender. The opposite is also true. If by-recipient was chosen and the message was posted to a newsgroup, Alpine will use the newsgroup name. If by-replyto is chosen and no value is obtained, Alpine uses by-from.
If any of the "by-realname" options are chosen, Alpine will attempt to use the personal name part of the address instead of the mailbox part. If any of the "by-nick" options are chosen, the address is looked up in your address book and if found, the nickname for that entry is used. Only simple address book entries are checked, not distribution lists. Similarly, if any of the "by-fcc" options are chosen, the fcc from the corresponding address book entry is used. If by-realname, or the by-nick or by-fcc lookups result in no value, then if the chosen option ends with the "then-from", "then-sender", "then-replyto", or "then-recip" suffix, Alpine reverts to the same behavior as "by-from", "by-sender", "by-replyto", or "by-recip" depending on which option was specified. If the chosen option doesn't end with one of the "then-" suffixes, then Alpine reverts to the default folder when no match is found in the address book.
Here is an example to make some of the options clearer. If the message is From
and this rule is set to "by-from", then the default folder offered in the save dialog would be "flint".
If this rule is set to "by-realname-of-from" then the default would be "Fred Flintstone".
If this rule is set to "by-nick-of-from" then Alpine will search for the address "flint@bedrock.org" in your address book. If an entry is found and it has a nickname associated with it, that nickname will be offered as the default folder. If not, the default saved message folder will be offered as the default.
If this rule is set to "by-fcc-of-from" then Alpine will search for the address "flint@bedrock.org" in your address book. If an entry is found and it has an Fcc associated with it, that Fcc will be offered as the default folder. If not, the default saved message folder will be offered as the default.
If this rule is set to "by-nick-of-from-then-from" then Alpine will search for the address "flint@bedrock.org" in your address book. If an entry is found and it has a nickname associated with it, that nickname will be offered as the default folder. If it is not found (or has no nickname) then the default offered will be the same as it would be for the "by-from" rule. That is, it would be "flint"
This option is displayed as "Saved Message Name Rule".
This option allows you to tell Alpine the number of lines from the top and bottom screen edge that line-by-line scrolling should occur. For example, setting this value to one (1) will cause Alpine to scroll the display when you move to select an item on the display's top or bottom edge (instead of moving when you move off the edge of the screen).
By default, this variable is zero (0), indicating that scrolling happens when you move up or down to select an item immediately off the display's top or bottom edge.
Sending filters do not work with PC-Alpine and sending filters are not used if the feature send-without-confirm is set.
Command Modifying Tokens:
This defaults to
~/.signature on UNIX and <PINERC
directory>\PINE.SIG on a PC.
To create or edit your signature file choose Setup from the Main Menu and then select S for Signature (Main/Setup/Signature). This puts you into the Signature Editor where you can enter a few lines of text containing your identity and affiliation.
If the filename is followed by a vertical bar (|) then instead of reading the contents of the file the file is assumed to be a program which will produce the text to be used on its standard output. The program can't have any arguments and doesn't receive any input from Alpine, but the rest of the processing works as if the contents came from a file.
Instead of storing the data in a local file, the signature data may be stored remotely in an IMAP folder. In order to do this, you must use a remote name for the file. A remote signature-file name might look like:
or, if you have an SSL-capable version of Alpine, you might try
The syntax used here is the same as the syntax used for remote configuration files from the command line. Note that you may not access an existing signature file remotely, you have to create a new folder which contains the signature data. If the name you use here for the signature file is a remote name, then when you edit the file from the Setup/Signature command the data will be stored remotely in the folder. You aren't required to do anything special to create the folder, it gets created automatically if you use a remote name.
Besides regular text, the signature file may also contain (or a signature program may produce) tokens which are replaced with text which usually depends on the message you are replying to or forwarding. For example, if the signature file contains the token
anywhere in the text, then that token is replaced by the date the message you are replying to or forwarding was sent. If it contains
that is replaced with the current date. The first is an example of a token which depends on the message you are replying to (or forwarding) and the second is an example which doesn't depend on anything other than the current date. You have to be a little careful with this facility since tokens which depend on the message you are replying to or forwarding will be replaced by nothing in the case where you are composing a new message from scratch. The use of roles may help you in this respect. It allows you to use different signature files in different cases.
The list of tokens available for use in the signature file is here.
Instead of, or along with the use of roles to give you different signature files in different situations, there is also a way to conditionally include text based on whether or not a token would result in specific replacement text. For example, you could include some text based on whether or not the _NEWS_ token would result in any newsgroups if it was used. This is explained in detail here. This isn't for the faint of heart.
In the very unlikely event that you want to include a literal token in the signature you must precede it with a backslash character. For example,
would produce something like
It is not possible to have a literal backslash followed by an expanded token.
If the option smime-public-cert-container is set then this option will have no effect.
Normally, Public Certificates for use with S/MIME will be stored in the directory which is the value of this option. Those certificates will be stored in PEM format, one certificate per file. The name of the file for the certificate corresponding to
should be
For example, a file for user@example.com would be in the file
in this directory.
Use the Setup/SMIME screen to modify this variable.
Typically, the public certificates that you have will come from S/MIME signed messages that are sent to you. Alpine will extract the public certificate from the signed message and store it in the certificates directory. These PEM format public certificates look something like:
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIFvTCCBKWgAwIBAgIQD4fYFHVI8T20yN4nus097DANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADCB rjELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxCzAJBgNVBAgTAlVUMRcwFQYDVQQHEw5TYWx0IExha2Ug Q2l0eTEeMBwGA1UEChMVVGhlIFVTRVJUUlVTVCBOZXR3b3JrMSEwHwYDVQQLExho ... 2b9KGqDyMWW/rjNnmpjzjT2ObGM7lRA8lke4FLOLajhrz4ogO3b4DFfAAM1VSZH8 D6sOwOLJZkLY8FRsfk63K+2EMzA2+qAzMKupgeTLqXIf -----END CERTIFICATE-----
This option is displayed as "S/MIME - Public Cert Directory".
If this option is set it will be used instead of smime-public-cert-directory
This option gives you a way to store certificates remotely on an IMAP server instead of storing the certificates one per file locally. In order to do that you just give this option a remote folder name for a folder which does not yet exist. The name is similar to the name you might use for a remote configuration file. A remote folder name might look something like:
Use the Setup/SMIME screen to modify this variable.
This option is displayed as "S/MIME - Public Cert Container".
In order to sign outgoing S/MIME messages you will need a personal digital ID certificate. You will usually get such a certificate from a certificate authority such as Thawte or CAcert. (In order to encrypt outgoing messages you don't need a personal digital ID, you need the public certificate of the recipient instead.) If the option smime-private-key-container is set then this option will have no effect.
Normally, Private Keys for use with S/MIME will be stored in the directory which is the value of this option. Those certificates will be stored in PEM format, one certificate per file. The name of the file for the certificate corresponding to your
should be
For example, if your address is user@example.com the name of the file would be
in this directory.
Use the Setup/SMIME screen to modify this variable.
Typically, the private key that you have will come from a Certificate Authority. The private key should be stored in a PEM format file that looks something like:
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- Proc-Type: 4,ENCRYPTED DEK-Info: DES-EDE3-CBC,2CBD328FD84CF5C6 YBEXYLgLU9NJoc1V+vJ6UvcF08RX54S6jXsmgL0b5HGkudG6fhnmHkH7+UCvM5NI SXO/F8iuZDfs1VGG0NyitkFZ0Zn2vfaGovBvm15gx24b2xnZDLRB7/bNZkurnK5k VjAjZ2xXn2hFp2GJwqRdmxYNqsKGu52B99oti5HUWuZ2GFRaWjn5hYOqeApZE2uA ... oSRqfI51UdSRt0tmGhHeTvybUVrHm9eKft8TTGf+qSBqzSc55CsmoVbRzw4Nfhix m+4TJybNGNfAgOctSkEyY/OCb49fRRQTCBZVIhzLGGmpYmkO55HbIA== -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
This option is displayed as "S/MIME - Private Key Directory".
If this option is set it will be used instead of smime-private-key-directory.
This option gives you a way to store keys remotely on an IMAP server instead of storing the keys one per file locally. In order to do that you just give this option a remote folder name for a folder which does not yet exist. The name is similar to the name you might use for a remote configuration file. A remote folder name might look something like:
Use the Setup/SMIME screen to modify this variable.
This option is displayed as "S/MIME - Private Key Container".
If the option smime-cacert-container is set then this option will have no effect.
CACert is a shorthand name for certification authority certificate. Normally Alpine will use the CACerts that are located in the standard system location for CACerts. It may be the case that one of your correspondents has a Digital ID which has been signed by a certificate authority that is not in the regular set of system certificate authorities. You may supplement the system list by adding further certificates of your own. These should be stored in the directory which is the value of this option. The certificates will be stored in PEM format, one certificate per file. The names of the files can be anything ending in ".crt".
Use the Setup/SMIME screen to modify this variable.
These PEM format CA certificates look very similar to your public certificates for particular email addresses (smime-public-cert-directory).
This option is displayed as "S/MIME - Cert Authority Directory".
If this option is set it will be used instead of smime-cacert-directory.
This option gives you a way to store certificates remotely on an IMAP server instead of storing the certificates one per file locally. In order to do that you just give this option a remote folder name for a folder which does not yet exist. The name is similar to the name you might use for a remote configuration file. A remote folder name might look something like:
Use the Setup/SMIME screen to modify this variable.
This option is displayed as "S/MIME - Cert Authority Container".
Your SMTP server may offer SMTP AUTH authentication. It may even require it. If your SMTP server offers SMTP AUTH authentication you may specify a "user" name parameter to cause Alpine to attempt to authenticate. This parameter requires an associated value, the username identifier with which to establish the server connection. An example might be:
If AUTH authentication is offered by the server, this will cause Alpine to attempt to use it. If AUTH authentication is not offered by the server, this will cause Alpine to fail sending with an error similar to:
Another type of authentication that is used by some ISPs is called "POP before SMTP" or "IMAP before SMTP", which means that you have to authenticate yourself to the POP or IMAP server by opening a mailbox before you can send mail. To do this, you usually only have to open your INBOX.
You may tell Alpine to use the Message Submission port (587) instead of the SMTP port (25) by including the "submit" parameter in this option. At this time "/submit" is simply equivalent to specifying port 587, though it may imply more than that at some point in the future. Some ISPs are blocking port 25 in order to reduce the amount of spam being sent to their users. You may find that the submit option allows you to get around such a block.
To specify any non-standard port number on the SMTP server you may follow the hostname with a colon followed by the portnumber.
Normally, when a connection is made to the Smtp-Server Alpine will attempt to negotiate a secure (encrypted) session using Transport Layer Security (TLS). If that fails then a non-encrypted connection will be attempted instead. You may specify that a TLS connection is required if you wish. If you append "/tls" to the name then the connection will fail instead of falling back to a non-secure connection.
See the SMTP Servers section or the Server Name Syntax section for some more details.
This option is displayed as "SMTP Server (for sending)".
For PC-Alpine, you must install the aspell library code that you may get from http://aspell.net/win32/.
This option affects the behavior of the ^T (spell check) command in the Composer. It specifies the program invoked by ^T in the Composer. By default, Alpine uses the system's "spell" command. Alpine will use the command defined by this option (if any) instead. When invoking the spell-checking program, Alpine appends a tempfile name (where the message is passed) to the command line. Alpine expects the speller to correct the spelling in that file. When you exit from the speller program Alpine will read the tmpfile back into the composer.
For Unix Alpine the program ispell works well as an
alternate spell checker.
If your Unix system has ispell it is probably reasonable to make
it the default speller by configuring it as the default in the
system configuration file, /etc/pine.conf.
If this option is not set, then the system's spell command is used. The spell command does not work the same as the alternate speller. It produces a list of misspelled words on its standard output, instead, and doesn't take a tempfile as an argument. Don't set this speller option to the standard Unix spell command. That won't work. If you want to use the standard Unix spell command, set the speller option to nothing.
imap).
/usr/bin/ssh.
If this is set to zero, the default value, it has no effect. Positive and negative values serve two similar, but different purposes.
If it is set to a positive number, it causes the cursor to move to the status line whenever a status message is printed and pause there for this many seconds. It will probably only be useful if the show-cursor feature is also turned on. Setting this option to a postive number can only be used to increase the status message delay. This may be useful for Braille displays, or other non-traditional displays.
If it is set to a negative number the interpretation is a bit complicated. Negative numbers are used to decrease the amount of delay Alpine uses to allow you to read important status messages. Of course, this may cause you to miss some important messages. If you see a message flash by but miss what it says you can use the Journal command from the Main menu to read it. If you set this option to a negative value, the delay will be no more than one second less than the absolute value of the value you set. So if you set it to -1, the delay will be no more than zero seconds, no delay at all. If you set it to -2, the delay will be no more than 1 second. And so on, -3 is 2 seconds, -4 is 3 seconds, ... If the delay that Alpine would have used by default is less than this delay, then the smaller delay set by Alpine will be used. Setting this option to a negative value can only reduce the amount of delay, never increase it.
Here is a more detailed explanation. Status messages are the messages which show up spontaneously in the status message line, the third line from the bottom of the screen. By default, Alpine assigns each status message it produces a minimum display time. Some status messages have a minimum display time of zero. You can see an example of such a message by paging up in this help text until you reach the top of the screen. If you try to page past the top you will see the message
in the status line. If there is another more important use of the status message line this message might be replaced quickly, or it even might not be shown at all. However, if there is no reason to get rid of the message, it might stay there for several seconds while you read the help. An example where it is replaced immediately happens when you page up in the help text past the top of the screen, but then type the "WhereIs" command right after paging up. The message will disappear immediately without causing a delay (unless you have set this option to a positive value) to allow you to type input for the "WhereIs" command. Since it isn't a very important message, Alpine has set its minimum display time to zero seconds.
Other messages have minimum display times of three or more seconds. These are usually error messages that Alpine thinks you ought to see. For example, it might be a message about a failed Save or a failed folder open. It is often the case that this minimum display time won't delay you in any way because the status message line is not needed for another reason. However, there are times when Alpine has to delay what it is doing in order to display a status message for the minimum display time. This happens when a message is being displayed and Alpine wants to ask for input from the keyboard. For example, when you Save a message you use the status message line. You get a prompt there asking for the name of the folder to save to. If there is a status message being displayed that has not yet displayed for its minimum time Alpine will display that status message surrounded with the characters > and < to show you that it is delaying. That might happen, for example, if you tried to save to a folder that caused an error, then followed that immediately with another Save command. You might find yourself waiting for a status message like
to finish displaying for three seconds. If that is something you find happening to you frequently, you may use negative values of this option to decrease or eliminate that delay, at the risk of missing the message.
Note: changes made to this list take effect the next time you open a folder in the list.
This is a list of folders that will be permanently kept open once they are first opened. The names in this list may be either the nickname of an Incoming folder or the full technical specification of a folder. The folders in this list need not be remote IMAP folders, they could usefully be local folders, as well. If a folder in the list is a newsgroup or is not accessed either locally or via IMAP, then the entry will be ignored. For example, folders accessed via NNTP or POP3 will not be kept open, since the way that new mail is found with those protocols involves closing and reopening the connection.
Once a Stay Open folder has been opened, new-mail checking will continue to happen on that folder for the rest of the Alpine session. Your INBOX is always implicitly included in this Stay-Open list and doesn't need to be added explicitly.
Another difference that you may notice between a Stay Open folder and a non-Stay Open folder is which message is selected as the current message when you enter the folder index. Normally, the starting position for an incoming folder (which most Stay Open folders will likely be) is controlled by the Incoming-Startup-Rule. However, if a folder is a Stay Open folder, when you re-enter the folder after the first time the current message will be the same as it was when you left the folder. An exception is made if you use the TAB command to get to the folder. In that case, the message number will be incremented by one from what it was when you left the folder.
The above special behavior is thought to be useful. However, it is special and different from what you might at first expect. The feature Use-Regular-Startup-Rule-for-Stayopen-Folders may be used to turn off this special treatment.
If the message that was current when you left the folder no longer exists, then the regular startup rule will be used instead.
This option is displayed as "Stayopen Folders".
1 Some topic
2 . Subject original message in thread
3 |-> reply to 2
4 . |-> another reply to 2
5 . | \-> reply to 4
6 . | \-> reply to 5
7 | \-> reply to 6
8 |-> another reply to 2
9 . |->New subject another reply to 2 but with a New subject
10 | |-> reply to 9
11 | \-> another reply to 9
12 | \-> reply to 11
13 \-> final reply to 2
14 Next topic
If this option is set to the Empty Value, then the column (and the following blank column) will be deleted from the display.
This option is closely related to the threading-indicator-character option. Another similar option which affects the thread display is the threading-lastreply-character option.
This setting affects the display when the folder is first threaded. The collapsed state may also be re-initialized by re-sorting the folder manually using the SortIndex command ($). After re-sorting the threads will once again all be expanded, even if you have previously collapsed some of them.
If "threading-display-style" is set to "none", then the display will be the regular default Alpine MESSAGE INDEX, but sorted in a different order.
This setting affects the display when the folder is first threaded. The collapsed state may also be re-initialized by re-sorting the folder manually using the SortIndex command ($). After re-sorting the threads will once again all be collapsed, even if you have previously expanded some of them.
The THREAD INDEX contains a '*' in the first column if any message in the thread is marked Important. If not, it contains a '+' if any message in the thread is to you. The second column is blank. The third column contains a 'D' if all of the messages in the thread are deleted. Otherwise, it contains an 'N' if any of the messages in the thread are New.
When you view a particular thread from the THREAD INDEX you will be in the MESSAGE INDEX display but the index will only contain messages from the thread you are viewing.
If this option is set to the Empty Value, then the column (and the following blank column) will be deleted from the display.
This option is closely related to the threading-expanded-character option. Another similar option which affects the thread display is the threading-lastreply-character option.
This option is displayed as "Threading Last Reply Character".
WINDOWS-1251 will
allow you to read those messages.
Of course, if the unlabeled message is actually in some other character set,
then you may see garbage on your screen.
In the Setup/Config screen you may choose from a list of all the character sets Alpine knows about by using the "T" ToCharsets command.
Additionally, to support various connection methods and browsers, each
entry in this list can begin with the special token
_TEST(test-string)_.
The test-string is a shell command that Alpine
will run and which must exit with a status of zero for Alpine to consider
that browser for use (the other criteria is that the browser must exist
as a full path or a path relative to your home directory).
Now for an example:
This example shows that for the first browser in the list to be used the environment variableurl-viewers=_TEST("test -n '${DISPLAY}'")_ /usr/bin/sensible-browser, /usr/bin/lynx, C:\BIN\NETSCAPE.BAT
DISPLAY must be defined.
If it is, then the file /usr/bin/sensible-browser must exist.
If either condition is not met, then the file
/usr/bin/lynx must exist.
If it doesn't, then the final path and file must
exist. Note that the last entry is a DOS/Windows path. This is one way
to support Alpine running on more than one architecture with the same
configuration file.
This option is displayed as "Viewer Headers".
The default is a left margin of 0 (zero). Misconfigurations (for example, negative values or values with starting left columns greater than the ending right column) are silently ignored. If the number of columns for text between the Viewer-Margin-Left and the Viewer-Margin-Right is fewer than 8, then margins of zero will be used instead.
The default right margin is 4. Misconfigurations (for example, negative values or values with starting left columns greater than the ending right column) are silently ignored. If the number of columns for text between the Viewer-Margin-Left and the Viewer-Margin-Right is fewer than 8, then margins of zero will be used instead.
no- prepended is in the list, it will turn the feature off.
This is useful for overriding system-wide defaults.
This is because, unlike all the other configuration variables,
the feature-list is additive.
That is, first the system-wide feature-list is read
and then the user's feature-list is read. This makes it possible
for the system manager to turn some of the features on by default while
still allowing the user to cancel that default.
For example, if the system manager has
turned on the allow-talk feature by default then a user may turn
it back off by including the feature no-allow-talk in his or her
personal configuration file. Of course, these details are usually handled
by Alpine when the user turns an option on or off from inside the
Setup/Config screen.
System managers should take some care when turning on features by default. Some of the documentation assumes that all of the features are off by default, so it could be confusing for a user if some are on by default instead. Feature names are case-independent.
Here is an alphabetical list of possible features.
The default value for this feature is ON, so that editing of From headers is allowed by default.
Note: The talk program has nothing to do with Alpine or email. The talk daemon on your system will attempt to print a message on your screen when someone else is trying to contact you. If you wish to see these messages while you are running Alpine, you should enable this feature.
If you do enable this feature and see a talk message, you must suspend or quit Alpine before you can respond.
New, for starting a new composition. Note that if New is selected and roles are set, roles are checked for matches and applied according to the setting of the matching role.
Interrupted, for continuing an interrupted composition. This option is only offered if an interrupted message folder is detected.
Postponed, for continuing postponed compositions. This option is offered if a postponed-folder is set in the config REGARDLESS OF whether or not the postponed folder actually exists. This option is especially handy for avoiding having to check for the existence of a remote postponed folder.
Form, for using form letters. This option is offered if the form-letter-folder is set in the config, and is not checked for existence for reasons similar to those explained by the postponed option.
setRole, for selecting a role to apply to a composition.
When Bouncing the "Set From" address is used for the Resent-From header, the "Set Fcc" value is used for the Fcc provided that the option "Fcc-On-Bounce" is turned on, and the "Use SMTP Server" value is used for the SMTP server, if set. Other actions of the role are ignored when Bouncing.
This feature is displayed as "Alternate Role (#) Menu".
This feature affects Alpine's display routines. If set, the normal inverse-video cursor (used to highlight the current item in a list) will be replaced by an arrow cursor and other screen update optimizations for low-speed links (e.g. 2400 bps dialup connections) will be activated. One of the optimizations is that colored index lines (set up with Indexcolor Rules) will not be colored. This might be useful if you know you have a slow speed link but for some reason Alpine doesn't know.
This feature is displayed as "Auto Move Read Messages".
When the TAB (Next New) key is pressed, and there are no more unseen messages in the current (incoming message or news) folder, Alpine will search the list of folders in the current collection for one containing New or Recent (new since the last time the folder was opened) messages. This behavior may be modified slightly with the Tab-Uses-Unseen-For-Next-Folder feature which causes Alpine to look for Unseen messages instead of Recent messages. By default, when such a folder is found, Alpine will ask whether you wish to open the folder. If this feature is set, Alpine will automatically open the folder without prompting.
The way that commands work won't be changed. For example, the Select All command will select all of the entries in the current address book, not all of the entries in all of the address books. The WhereIs command will change a little. It will search through all of the text on the screen plus all of the entries from expanded address books.
When this feature is set, the setting of the feature expanded-view-of-addressbooks has an effect.
This feature is displayed as "Combined Addressbook Display".
The way that commands work won't be changed. For example, the Select All command will select all of the folders in the current collection, not all of the entries in all of the collections. The WhereIs command will change a little. It will search through all of the folders in the current collection as well as all the folder in any other expanded collection.
When this feature is set, the setting of the feature expanded-view-of-folders has an effect.
Enabling this feature will cause the contents of the selected directory to be displayed within the boundaries of the Collection it is a part of. All previously displayed collections will remain in the screen.
The way that commands work won't be changed. For example, the Select All command will select all of the folders in the directory, as opposed to all of the entries in all of the collections. The WhereIs command will change a little. It will search through all of the folders in the current collection as well as all the folder in any other expanded collection.
If this feature is set the confirmation asked for will be a "Yes" instead of a "Confirm" response.
This feature is displayed as "Ctrl-K Cuts From Cursor".
This feature is displayed as "Delete Key Maps to Ctrl-D".
A complete (fully-qualified) address is one containing a username followed by an @ symbol, followed by a host or domain name (e.g. jsmith@example.com). An unqualified name is one without the @ symbol and host or domain name (e.g. jsmith).
This feature is displayed as "Compose Rejects Unqualified Addresses".
This feature is displayed as "Compose Sets Newsgroup Without Confirming".
If you are using the alternate form of the Compose command called "Role", then all of your roles will be available to you, independent of the value of this feauture and of the values set for all of Reply Use, Forward Use, and Compose Use.
If this feature is set you will not be asked. It will be assumed that you want to continue.
This feature is displayed as "Continue NextNew Without Confirming".
Note that this does not affect the results of Select by Date or of anything else other than these displayed dates. When viewing the message you may look at the original unconverted value of the Date header by using the HdrMode Command.
If a role is being used and it has a From address defined, that From address will be used rather than the one derived from this feature.
In the Save prompt, some users prefer that the Up and Down arrow keys be used for the Previous Collection and Next Collection commands instead of for a history of previous saves. If this option is set the Up and Down arrow keys will become synonyms for the Previous Collection and Next Collection (^P and ^N) commands in the prompt for the name of a folder to Save to or in the prompt for the name of a folder to GoTo. When this feature is not set (the default), ^P and ^N will change the collection and the arrow keys will show the history.
If this feature is set, then the passwords will not be cached and the user will have to retype the password whenever Alpine needs it. Even with this feature set there is still some chance that the core file will contain a password, so care should be taken to make the core files unreadable.
NOTE: If PASSFILE caching is enabled, this does not disable it. That is a separate and independent feature.
This feature is displayed as "Do Not Generate Sender Header".
is used by Alpine. If you want to try turning it off, setting this feature will turn it off. This part of the locale has to do with the sort order of characters in your locale.
Nickname : nick
Fullname : Bedrock Elders
Fcc :
Comment :
Addresses : Fred Flintstone <flint@bedrock.org>,
Barney Rubble <rubble@bedrock.org>
but with this feature set it would look like
Nickname : nick
Fullname : Bedrock Elders
Fcc :
Comment :
Addresses : flint@bedrock.org,
rubble@bedrock.org
instead. Note the difference in the Addresses field.
Last, Firstinstead of
First LastIt does this because many people find it useful to sort by Last name instead of First name. If this feature is set, then the TakeAddr command will not attempt to reverse the name in this manner.
This feature affects Alpine's behavior when using Display-Filters. Normally, before the display filter is run, the terminal mode is reset to what it was before you started Alpine. This may be necessary if the filter requires the use of the terminal. For example, it may need to interact with you. If you set this feature, then the terminal mode will not be reset. One thing that turning on this feature should fix is the coloring of quoted text in the message view, which breaks because the terminal reset resets the color state of the terminal (Color Configuration).
These extra boundaries are invisible to recipients that use MIME-aware email programs (the vast majority). However, if you correspond with users of email programs that are not MIME-aware, or do not handle the extra boundaries gracefully, you can use this feature to prevent Alpine from including the extra MIME information. Of course, it will increase the likelihood that non-ASCII text you send may appear corrupt to the recipient.
However, there are now Internet standards that allow for unencoded 8bit exchange of messages between cooperating systems. When this feature is set Alpine will try to negotiate unencoded 8bit transmission during the sending process. Should the negotiation fail, Alpine will fall back to its ordinary encoding rules.
Note, this feature relies on your system's mail transport agent or configured smtp-server having the negotiation mechanism introduced in "Extended SMTP" (ESMTP) and the specific extension called 8BITMIME.
Moreover, there is no Internet standard for explicitly negotiating 8bit transfer, as there is for Internet email. Therefore, Alpine provides the option of posting unencoded 8bit news messages, though not as the default. Setting this feature will turn OFF Alpine's MIME encoding of newsgroup postings that contain 8bit characters.
Note, articles may cross a path or pass through news transport software that is unsafe or even hostile to 8bit characters. At best this will only cause the posting to become garbled. The safest way to transmit 8bit characters is to leave Alpine's MIME encoding turned on, but recipients who lack MIME-aware tools are often annoyed when they receive MIME-encoded messages.
This feature also enables the ^X subcommand in the "Folder Index" WhereIs command which causes all messages matching the WhereIs argument to become selected.
You may also use aggregate operations in the address book screens where you are operating on address book entries instead of on messages.
If the environment variable $EDITOR is set,
this value will be offered as a default.
If the editor variable is set, the ^_ key will activate
the specified editor without prompting, in which case it is not necessary to
set the enable-alternate-editor-cmd feature.
This feature is not available in PC-Alpine.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Alternate Editor Command".
If you set this feature, and do not like the changed behavior of the up/down arrow keys when navigating through the FOLDER LIST screen -- first from column to column, if more than one folder is displayed per row, and then from row to row -- you may either also wish to set the feature enable-arrow-navigation-relaxed, single-column-folder-list, or use the ^P/^N (instead of up/down arrow) keys to move up/down the list of folders in each column.
When this feature is set, the left and right arrow keys in the FOLDER LIST screen move the highlight bar to the left or right, and the up and down arrows move it up or down.
When the "Enable-Arrow-Navigation" feature is set and this feature is not set; the left and right arrow keys in the Folder List screen strictly track the commands bound to the '<' and '>' keys, and the up and down arrow keys move the highlight bar to the previous and next folder or directory name.
This feature isn't supported on all systems. All DOS and Windows, as well as several Unix ports, do not recognize this feature. It is not possible to use background sending if the feature send-without-confirm is set.
Error handling is significantly different when this feature is enabled. Any message posting failure results in the message being appended to your Interrupted mail folder. When you type the Compose command, Alpine will notice this folder and offer to extract any messages contained. Upon continuing a failed message, Alpine will display the nature of the failure in the status message line.
Under extreme conditions, it is possible for message data to get lost. Do not enable this feature if you typically run close to any sort of disk-space limits or quotas.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Bounce Command".
NOTE: Beware when enabling this feature and the expunge-without-confirm feature.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Cruise Mode With Deleting".
It is not possible to use delivery status notifications if the feature send-without-confirm is set.
Note that this is not a method to request READ receipts, which tells the sender when the receiver has read the message. In this case we're talking about notification of delivery to the mailbox, not notification that the message has been seen.
When the TAB (NextNew) key is pressed, the default behavior is to explicitly examine the status of the folder for the number of recent messages (messages delivered since the last time it was viewed). Depending on the size and number of messages in the folder, this test can be time consuming.
Enabling this feature will cause Alpine to only test for the existence of any recent messages rather than to obtain the count. This is much faster in many cases. The downside is that you're not given the number of recent messages when prompted to view the next folder. If the feature Tab-Uses-Unseen-For-Next-Folder is turned on, then the present feature will have no effect.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Flag Command".
An example is easier to understand than the explanation. The flag command can always be used to set the system flags. For example, to set the Answered flag you would type
Now suppose you have defined a keyword "Work" using the Keywords option in the Config screen. By default, to set a keyword like "Work" you would usually have to go to the Flag Details screen using the "^T To Flag Details" command. Instead, if you have enabled this feature, you may type
to set the Work flag, or
to unset it. Just like for the other flag setting commands, the case of the letter does not matter, so "w" or "W" both set the "Work" keyword.
Notice that you can only use this trick for one keyword that begins with "W". If you happen to have a "Work" keyword and another keyword that is "WIFI" the "* W" command will set the first one in your list of keywords. Also, there are five letters which are reserved for system flags and the NOT command. If you type "* A" it will always set the Answered flag, not your "Aardvark" keyword. In order to set the "Aardvark" keyword you'll still have to use the Flag Details screen.
Because enabling the Enable-Flag-Screen-Implicitly option causes Alpine to skip directly to the Flag Details screen when the Flag command is used, setting it will cause this feature to have no effect at all.
Similarly, when Selecting by Keyword, setting this option will allow you to use Keyword initials instead of full keywords.
If Full Header mode is turned on and you Forward a message, you will be asked if you'd like to forward the message as an attachment, as opposed to including the text of the message in the body of your new message.
If you have also turned on the "Quote Suppression" option then the Full Headers command actually rotates through three states instead of just two. The first is the normal view with long quotes suppressed. The second is the normal view but with the long quotes included. The last enables the display of all headers in the message. When using Export, Pipe, Print, Forward, or Reply the quotes are never suppressed, so the first two states are identical.
Normally, the Header Mode will reset to the default behavior when moving to a new message. The mode can be made to persist from message to message by setting the feature Quell-Full-Header-Auto-Reset.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Full Header Command".
This feature affects how the H Full Headers command displays message text. If set, the raw message text will be displayed. This especially affects MIME formatted email, where the entire MIME format will be displayed. This feature similarly affects how messages are included for the Export, Pipe, Print, Forward, and Reply functions.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Incoming Folders Collection".
If a check for Unseen messages fails for a particular folder then Alpine will no longer attempt to check that folder for the duration of the session and this will be indicated by a question mark inside the parentheses.
The features incoming-checking-includes-total, incoming-checking-uses-recent, incoming-check-list, incoming-check-interval, incoming-check-interval-secondary, and incoming-check-timeout all affect how this feature behaves.
If this feature is set, dates are displayed in English and with the conventions of the United States.
If you find that Alpine is erroneously displaying blank folder lists, try enabling this feature.
NOTE: Enabling this feature has consequences for the Goto and Save commands. Many servers allow access to folders outside the area reserved for your personal folders via some reserved character, typically '#' (sharp), '~' (tilde) or '/' (slash). This mechanism allows, at the Goto and Save prompts, quick access to folders outside your personal folder collection without requiring a specific collection definition. This behavior will generally not be available when this feature is enabled.
This feature is displayed as "Compensate for Deficient IMAP servers".
This feature is displayed as "Enable Mailcap Parameter Substitution".
This type of mouse support will also work in some terminal emulators which are not actually X terminals, but which have extra code to support the xterm style mouse. For those emulators you not only need to turn this feature on but you also have to set the $DISPLAY environment variable even though it isn't needed for your terminal. That will cause Alpine to think that it is an xterm and to properly interpret the escape sequences sent by the mouse.
Note: if this feature is set, the behavior of X terminal cut-and-paste is also modified. It is sometimes possible to hold the shift key down while clicking left or middle mouse buttons for the normal xterm cut/paste operations. There is also an Alpine command to toggle this mode on or off. The command is Ctrl-\ (Control-backslash).
The first available email address is displayed in inverse. This is the "selected" address. Pressing RETURN will cause Alpine to enter the message composition screen with the To field filled in with the selected address.
Use the up and down arrow keys to change which of the addresses displayed in boldface is the current selection.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Message View Address Links".
Speaking of arrow keys, the Up and Down Arrows will select the next and previous attachments if one is available on the screen for selection. Otherwise, they will simply adjust the viewed text one line up or down.
Similarly, when selectable items are present in a message, the Ctrl-F key can be used to select the next item in the message independent of which portion of the viewed message is currently displayed. The Ctrl-B key can be used to select the previous item in the same way.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Message View Attachment Links".
Setting this feature causes the Up and Down arrow keys to behave as if no selectable items were present in the message.
Note, the Ctrl-F (next selectable item) and Ctrl-B (previous selectable item) functionality is unchanged.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Message View Forced Arrows".
The first available URL is displayed in inverse. This is the
"selected" URL. Pressing RETURN will cause Alpine to display
the selected URL via either built-in means as with mailto:,
imap:, news:, and nntp:,
or via an external application as defined
by the url-viewers variable.
Use the up and down arrow keys to change which of the URLs displayed in boldface is the current selection.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Message View URL Links".
The first available hostname is displayed in inverse. This is the "selected" hostname. Pressing RETURN will cause Alpine to display the selected hostname via an external application as defined by the url-viewers variable.
Use the up and down arrow keys to change which of the hostnames displayed in boldface is the current selection.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Message View Web Hostname Links".
Under this feature, the name of a newsrc is based on the news server. For example, if your newsrc-path is set to ".newsrc", and the news server you are connecting to is news.example.com, then the newsrc to be used is .newsrc-news.example.com. Setting this feature for the first time will allow for the option of using your old newsrc the next time you read news.
If this feature is set, then the feature Mult-Newsrc-Hostnames-As-Typed also may affect the name of the newsrc file that is used.
$DISPLAY variable indicates that an X
terminal is being used, Alpine will send appropriate escape sequences to
the X terminal to modify the label on Alpine's icon to indicate that new
mail has arrived. Alpine will also modify the Alpine window's title to
indicate new mail.
See also Enable-Newmail-Short-Text-in-Icon.
Enabling this feature will cause Alpine to recognize both the old command, Y, and the new % method for invoking printing. Note, key menu labels are not changed as a result of enabling this feature.
Thus, you can change Alpine's default message quote character (usually an angle bracket) on a per message basis. So you could change your quoted message to look, for example, like this:
On Tues, 26 Jan 1999, John Q. Smith wrote: John: I just wanted to say hello and to congratulate you John: on a job well done!
The configuration option "reply-indent-string" may be used to change what appears as the default string to be edited.
NOTE: Edited reply-indent-strings only apply to the message currently being replied to.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Take Rules".
-- " (dash dash space) is included
before the signature.
This only happens if the signature doesn't already contain such a line.
In addition, when you Reply or Followup to a message containing one of these special lines and choose to include its text, Alpine will observe the convention of not including text beyond the special line in your reply.
Similarly, this feature also enables TAB completion of address book nicknames when at a prompt for a nickname, or when typing in an address field in the composer.
Rather than add another icon to the Taskbar, this version of PC-Alpine will color its Taskbar entry's icon red (as well as the icon in the Window Title). This feature is only provided for backwards compatibility.
This feature is displayed as "Enable Unix Pipe Command".
VERB (i.e., VERBose) command
early in the posting process
intended to cause the server SMTP to provide a more detailed account of
the transaction. This feature is typically only useful to system
administrators and other support personel as an aid in troublshooting
problems.
Note, this feature relies on a specific capability of the system's mail
transport agent or configured smtp-server.
If set, most configuration variables and features which are normally hidden from view will show up in the Setup/Configuration screen. They will be at the bottom of the configuration screen. You can find them by searching for the word "hidden".
Note that this is an advanced feature which should be used with care. The reason that this part of the configuration is normally hidden is because there is a significant potential for causing problems if you change these variables. If something breaks after a change try changing it back to see if that is what is causing the problem. There are also some variables which are normally hidden because they are manipulated through Alpine in other ways. For example, the "address-book" variable is normally set using the Setup/AddressBooks screen, so there is little reason to edit it directly. The "incoming-folders" variable is normally changed by using the Add, Delete, and Rename commands in the FOLDER LIST screen, and the "last-time-prune-questioned" variable is normally used internally by Alpine and not set directly by the user.
This feature is displayed as "Expunge Without Confirming".
This feature is displayed as "Expunge Without Confirming Everywhere".
This feature is displayed as "Include Fcc When Bouncing Messages".
This feature is closely related to warn-if-blank-to-and-cc-and-newsgroups. The difference between this feature and that feature is that this feature considers a Bcc to be a recipient while that feature will ask for confirmation even if there is a Bcc when there is no To, Cc, or Newsgroup. The default values also differ. This feature defaults to asking the question and you have to turn it off. The warn-if-blank-to-and-cc-and-newsgroups feature defaults to not asking unless you turn it on.
This feature is displayed as "Send to Fcc Only Without Confirming".
Normally, Alpine saves an exact copy of your message as it was sent. When this feature is enabled, the "body" of the message you send (the text you type in the composer) is preserved in the copy as before, however all attachments are replaced with text explaining what had been sent rather than the attachments themselves.
This feature also affects Alpine's "Send ?" confirmation prompt in that a new "^F Fcc Attchmnts" option becomes available which allows you to interactively set whether or not attachments are saved to the Fcc'd copy.
This feature is displayed as "Fcc Does Not Include Attachments".
This is the same index cursor you get if you turn on Assume-Slow-Link, but the index line coloring will still be present if this feature is turned on and Assume-Slow-Link is off.
An alternative version of the Arrow cursor is available by including the ARROW token in the Index-Format option.
It ought to be the case that this feature also affects the ATTACHMENT INDEX, but that is not implemented.
instead.
It should be noted that many servers being connected to will still reveal the information that this feature attempts to protect.
When incoming folder checking is turned on the default is to display the number of unseen messages in each folder. More precisely, it is the number of undeleted unseen messages. Using this option you may also display the total number of messages in each folder. Instead of a single number representing the number of unseen messages you will get two numbers separated by a slash character. The first is the number of unseen messages and the second is the total number of messages.
You may also use the recent message count instead of the unseen message count by turning on the feature incoming-checking-uses-recent.
When incoming folder checking is turned on the default is to display the number of unseen messages in each folder. More precisely, it is the number of undeleted unseen messages. Using this option you may display the number of recent messages instead of the number of unseen messages. A message is only counted as recent if this is the first session to see it, so the recent count might be less than the unseen count. The difference between the two would be accounted for by the unseen messages in the folder which were there previously but have not been looked at yet.
If you simultaneously run more than one email client at a time (for example, you run more than one Alpine in parallel) then turning this feature on can cause some confusion. The confusion stems from the fact that each message is only considered to be recent in one session. That means that the counts of new messages may be different in the two Alpines running side by side, because each incoming message will only be counted as recent in one of the two sessions.
You may also display the total number of messages in each folder by using the incoming-checking-includes-total option.
This feature is displayed as "LDAP Result to Addressbook Add".
If this feature is set, then the state changes will not be lost.
In any case, messages which are already marked Deleted when the mail is to be copied from the Mail Drop will be ignored.
it is likely that the canonical name will be something like
Or it may be the case that
is really an alias (a DNS CNAME) for
If this feature is not set, then the canonicalized names will be used. If this feature is set, then the name you typed in (or put in your configuration) will be used.
This feature is displayed as "Multiple Newsrc Hostnames as Typed".
When opening a newsgroup, Alpine will consult your newsrc file and determine the last message you have previously disposed of via the D key. If this feature is set, any subsequent messages will be shown in the Index with an N, and the first of these messages will be highlighted. Although this is only an approximation of true New or Unseen status, it provides a useful cue to distinguish more-or-less recent messages from those you have seen previously, but are not yet ready to mark deleted.
Background: your newsrc file (used to store message status information for newsgroups) is only capable of storing a single flag, and Alpine uses this to record whether or not you are "done with" a message, as indicated by marking the message as Deleted. Unfortunately, this means that Alpine has no way to record exactly which messages you have previously seen, so it normally does not show the N status flag for any messages in a newsgroup. This feature enables a starting approximation of seen/unseen status that may be useful.
Alpine's default behavior when you delete such a message is to remove only the copy in the current newsgroup from view when you use the "Exclude" command or the next time you visit the newsgroup.
Enabling this feature causes Alpine to remove every occurrence of the message from all newsgroups it appears in and to which you are subscribed.
NOTE: As currently implemented, enabling this feature may increase the time it takes the Expunge command and newsgroup closing to complete.
This feature is useful if you typically read all the interesting messages in a newsgroup each time you open it. This feature saves you from having to delete each message in a newsgroup as you read it or from selecting all the messages and doing an aggregate delete before you move on to the next folder or newsgroup.
This feature only has an effect in the MESSAGE INDEX screen. If you then view a particular message from that screen and press the Next command, you will be sent to the next thread without being asked, independent of the setting of this feature.
The feature auto-open-next-unread, also has some similar effects.
This feature is displayed as "Read Next Thread Without Confirming".
If this feature is set the "close" sequence handling will take place every time you leave the INBOX. The INBOX will still be kept open, but the offer to Expunge and the archiving to the Read-Message-Folder will take place each time you leave the INBOX instead of only once at the end of the session.
If this feature is set the "close" sequence handling will take place when you leave the Stay Open folder. The folder will still be kept open, but the offer to Expunge and the archiving will take place each time you leave the folder instead of only once at the end of the session. This feature does not affect the INBOX, which will still only be processed when you exit Alpine.
If the feature pass-control-characters-as-is is set, then this feature has no effect. However, if you wish to filter out regular control characters but pass the so-called C1 control characters (0x80 <= char < 0xA0) through unchanged, then you may leave pass-control-characters-as-is unset and set this feature.
If set, all characters in a message will be sent to the screen. Normally, control characters are automatically suppressed in order to avoid inadvertently changing terminal setup parameters. Control characters are usually displayed as two character sequences like
for Control-C,
for ESCAPE,
for DELETE, and
for the character with value 133 (0x85). (The DEL character is displayed as ^?, regular control characters are displayed as the character ^ followed by the character obtained by adding the five low-order bits of the character to 0x40, and the C1 control characters 0x80 - 0x9F are displayed as the character ~ followed by the character obtained by adding the five low-order bits of the character to 0x40.) Sometimes, in cases where changing a single control character into a two-character sequence would confuse Alpine's display routines, a question mark is substituted for the control character.
If you wish to filter out regular control characters but pass the so-called C1 control characters (0x80 <= char < 0xA0) through unchanged, then you may leave this feature unset and set the feature pass-c1-control-characters-as-is instead.
This feature can be especially handy when used in conjunction with enable-multiple-newsrcs.
This option is displayed as "NNTP Server (for news)".
If this option is set, then any plain text version will be preferred to all other versions.
By default, Alpine turns the system's handling of these special characters off except during printing. However, if you see Alpine reporting input errors such as:
[ Command "^Q" not defined for this screen. ]and, at the same time, see your display become garbled, then it is likely that setting this option will solve the problem. Be aware, though, that enabling this feature will also cause Alpine to ostensibly "hang" whenever the Ctrl-S key combination is entered as the system is now interpreting such input as a "stop output" command. To "start output" again, simply type Ctrl-Q.
This feature is displayed as "Preserve Start/Stop Characters".
From user@domain.somewhere.com Mon May 13 14:11:06 1996
This feature is displayed as "Print Offers Custom Command Prompt".
By default, the name used when renaming a folder looks like
For example, the first time you run Alpine in May of 2004, the folder "sent-mail" might be renamed to
If this feature is set, the name used will be of the form
where "yyyy" is the year and "mm" is the two-digit month (01, 02, ..., 12). For the April, 2004 example above, it would instead be
because April is the 4th month of the year. A reason you might want to set this feature is so that the folders will sort in chronological order.
If this feature is set the Mac OS X default keychain will be used as the place to store public certificates instead of a smime-public-cert-directory or a smime-public-cert-container.
This feature is displayed as "S/MIME -- Public Certs in MacOS Keychain".
This feature can be used along side quell-attachment-extra-prompt to preserve the behavior exhibited in Pine versions prior to Pine 4.50.
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Attachment Extension Warning".
If this feature is set, you will not be prompted to confirm your selection. Prior to Pine 4.50, the default behavior was to not prompt. This feature was added for those wanting to preserve that behavior.
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Attachment Extra Prompt".
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Berkeley Format Timezone".
Setting this feature also suppresses the comment about the character set in header lines. For example, when viewing a message you might see
in the From header if your Character-Set is something other than ISO-8859-2. If you set this feature, the comment about the character set will no longer be there.
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Character Set Warning".
If this feature is set then Alpine will remove most Content-ID headers before sending a message. If an attachment is of type MESSAGE, then the existing Content-ID headers inside the message will be left intact. This would only happen with Alpine if a message was forwarded as an attachment or if a message with a message attached was forwarded. Similarly if an attachment of type MULTIPART/ALTERNATIVE is forwarded, the Content-ID headers of the alternative parts will not be removed.
Because the Content-ID header is a standard part of MIME it is possible that setting this feature will break something. For example, if an attachment has a Content-ID header which is necessary for the correct functioning of that attachment, it is possible that Alpine may remove that header when the attachment is forwarded. However, it seems fairly safe at this time.
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Content-ID".
dead.letter in your home directory (under UNIX;
DEADLETR under WINDOWS/DOS) overwriting any previous message.
Under some conditions (some routine), this can introduce a noticeable delay.
Setting this feature will cause Alpine NOT to write canceled compositions
into the file called dead.letter.
This feature affects the newer option Dead-Letter-Files, which specifies the number of dead letter files to keep around. If this feature is set, then the Dead-Letter-Files option has no effect.
This feature is displayed as "Do Not Save to Deadletter on Cancel".
Note, enabling this feature can cause surprising behavior! For example, you can still use Add to create a directory, but unless you immediately enter that directory and create a folder, that newly created directory may not be displayed next time you enter the folder list.
This feature is displayed as "Hide Empty Directories".
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Extra Posting Prompt".
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Filtering Done Message".
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Filtering Messages".
This feature turns off the generation of flowed text, as it might be desired to more tightly control how a message is displayed on the receiving end.
If this feature is not set, you can control on a message by message basis whether or not flowed text is generated. You do this by typing ^V at the Send confirmation prompt that you get after typing ^X to send a message. ^V is a toggle which turns flowing off and back on if typed again. If for some reason flowing cannot be done on a particular message, then the ^V command will not be available. This would be the case, for example, if this feature was set, or if your "Reply-Indent-String" was set to a non-default value. If the feature Send-Without-Confirm is set, then the opportunity to control on a message by message basis whether or not flowed text is generated is lost.
When this feature is not set and you have typed ^V to turn off flowing, the Send confirmation prompt will change to look like
Strip-Whitespace-Before-Send will also turn off the sending of flowed text messages, but it differs in that it also trims all trailing white space from a message before sending it.
If alternate editors are used extensively, be aware that a message will still be sent flowed if this feature is unset. In most cases this will be fine, but if the editor has a "flowed text" mode, it would be best to use that.
This feature is displayed as "Do Not Send Flowed Text".
Alpine will normally create these pseudo messages when they are not already present in a standard Unix or MMDF folder. Their purpose is to record certain mailbox state data needed for correct IMAP and POP server operation, and also for Alpine to be able to mark messages as Answered when the Reply has been postponed.
Sites which do not use IMAP/POP for remote mail access, and which need to support mail tools that are adversely affected by the presence of the pseudo-messages (e.g. some mail notification tools) may enable this feature to tell Alpine not to create them. Note that Alpine's "Answered" flag capability will be adversely affected if this is done.
Note too that, even if this feature is enabled, Alpine will not remove pseudo-messages when it encounters them (e.g. those created by UW's imapd or ipopd servers.) This feature has no effect on folders that are not in standard Unix or MMDF format, as pseudo-messages are not needed in the other formats to record mailbox state information.
This feature is displayed as "Prevent Folder Internal Message".
The presence or absence of the HdrMode command is determined by the "Enable-Full-Header-Cmd" Feature-List option.
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Full Header Auto Reset".
Setting this feature causes Alpine to wait for all of the information to be gathered before it paints the index screen. Once it collects all of the information, the screen will be painted quickly from top to bottom.
This feature is displayed as "Suppress IMAP Envelope Update".
Alpine issues a warning when such failures occur, which can become bothersome if the system is configured to disallow such actions. Setting this feature causes Alpine to remain silent when this part of lock creation fails.
WARNING: systems that have been configured in a way that precludes locking introduce some risk of mail folder corruption when more than one program attempts to modify the mail folder. This is most likely to occur to one's INBOX or other "Incoming Message Folder".
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Lock Failure Warnings".
If this option is set, then the normal new-mail checking which happens while you are composing will not happen for folders other than your INBOX (which depends on the setting of "Quell-Mailchecks-Composing-Inbox").
You might want to set this option if you are experiencing delays while composing which you think might be related to the speed of the new-mail checks.
Even with this option turned on, an occasional new-mail check may be done in order to keep the server from killing the connection to the folder. For example, IMAP servers may remove a connection to a folder if there has been no activity on the connection for 30 minutes or more. Instead of letting that happen, Alpine will check for new mail before the 30 minutes is up even though you have turned on this feature to quell those checks.
Besides new-mail checks, checkpoint operations on the folders will also be quelled when you set this option. The purpose of checkpointing is to write the changes to a folder out to disk periodically in order to avoid losing those changes when system or software problems occur. New-mail checking and checkpointing while you are not composing are not affected by this option.
This feature is displayed as "Prevent Mailchecks While Composing Except for INBOX".
If this option is set, then the normal new-mail checking which happens while you are composing will not happen for your INBOX. Checking of other folders is controlled in a similar way with the "Quell-Mailchecks-Composing-Except-Inbox" option.
You might want to set this option if you are experiencing delays while composing which you think might be related to the speed of the new-mail checks.
Even with this option turned on, an occasional new-mail check may be done in order to keep the server from killing the connection to the folder. For example, IMAP servers may remove a connection to a folder if there has been no activity on the connection for 30 minutes or more. Instead of letting that happen, Alpine will check for new mail before the 30 minutes is up even though you have turned on this feature to quell those checks.
Besides new-mail checks, checkpoint operations on the INBOX will also be quelled when you set this option. The purpose of checkpointing is to write the changes to a folder out to disk periodically in order to avoid losing those changes when system or software problems occur. New-mail checking and checkpointing while you are not composing are not affected by this option.
This feature is displayed as "Prevent Mailchecks While Composing for INBOX".
If this feature is set, the warning is turned off. This feature is displayed as "Suppress Maildomain Warning".
Setting this feature causes Alpine to wait for all of the information to be gathered before it paints the index screen. Once it collects all of the information, the screen will be painted quickly from top to bottom.
This feature is displayed as "Suppress News Envelope Update".
This feature is displayed as "Prevent Partial Fetching".
Setting this feature will prevent the server name from being appended to the displayed text.
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Server After Link in HTML".
Microsoft is aware of the problem and has developed a hotfix for it, but as of this writing the hotfix has not yet been added to the Knowledge Base.
This feature is displayed as "Prevent SSL Largeblocks".
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Status Message Beeping".
This feature is displayed as "Suppress Timezone Comment When Sending".
With this feature set, composing a message is only possible after establishing a connection to the INBOX.
Normally, names you enter into address fields (e.g. To: or Cc:) are checked against your address book(s) to see if they match an address book nickname. Failing that, (in Unix Alpine) the name is then checked against the Unix password file. If the entered name matches a username in the system password file, Alpine extracts the corresponding Full Name information for that individual, and adds that to the address being entered.
However, password file matching can have surprising (incorrect) results if other users of the system do not receive mail at the domain you are using. That is, if either the user-domain or use-only-domain-name option is set such that the administrative domain of other users on the system isn't accurately reflected, Alpine should be told that a password file match is coincidental, and Full Name info will be incorrect. For example, a personal name from the password file could get falsely paired with the entered name as it is turned into an address in the configured domain.
If you are seeing this behavior, enabling this feature will prevent Unix Alpine from looking up names in the password file to find the Full Name for incomplete addresses you enter.
This feature is displayed as "Prevent User Lookup in Password File".
This feature is displayed as "Quit Without Confirming".
This feature is displayed as "Return to INBOX Without Confirming".
This feature is displayed as "Save Combines Copies (may be out of order)".
If this feature is set, you will not be asked.
This feature is displayed as "Save Partial Message Without Confirming".
> character in front of message
lines beginning with "From" when they are
saved to another folder, including lines syntactically
distinguishable from the type of message separator line commonly used on
Unix systems.
The default behavior is that a > will be prepended only to lines
beginning with "From " that might otherwise be confused with a message
separator line on Unix systems. If Alpine is the only mail program you use,
this default is reasonable. If another program you use has trouble
displaying a message with an unquoted From saved by Alpine, you should
enable this feature. This feature only applies to the common Unix mailbox
format that uses message separator lines beginning with "From ". If
Alpine has been configured to use a different mailbox format (possibly
incompatible with other mail programs), then this issue does not arise,
and the feature is irrelevant.
It is possible (but unlikely?) that some spam detection software will use that as a reason to reject the mail as spam. It has also been reported that some spam detection software uses the fact that there are no dots after the "@" as a reason to reject messages. If your PC-Alpine Message-ID is using a name without a dot that is because that is what Windows thinks is your "Full computer name". The method used to set this varies from one type of Windows to another but check under Settings -> Control Panel -> System and look for Network Identification or Computer Name or something similar. How to set it is beyond the scope of Alpine.
This feature is displayed as "Scramble the Message-ID When Sending".
This feature is displayed as "Select Ctrl-T Foldername Without Confirming".
If this feature is set, you will not be prompted to confirm your intent to send and your message will be sent.
If this feature is set it disables some possibilities and renders some other features meaningless. You will not be able to use Sending Filters, Verbose sending mode, Background Sending, Delivery Status Notifications, or ^V to turn off the generation of flowed text for this message. These options are normally available as suboptions in the Send prompt, but with no Send prompt the options are gone.
A somewhat related feature is quell-extra-post-prompt. which may be used to eliminate the extra confirmation question when posting to a newsgroup.
This feature is displayed as "Send Without Confirming".
Enabling this feature will cause Alpine to display such names separately marking the name representing a directory with a trailing hierarchy delimiter (typically the slash, "/", character).
The feature also alters the command set slightly. By default, the right-arrow descends into the directory, while hitting the Return key will cause the folder by that name to be opened.
With this feature set, the Return key will open the highlighted folder, or enter the highlighted directory.
Enabling this feature causes Alpine to ignore any external viewer settings and always display text with Alpine's internal viewer.
added between the title of the screen and the folder name. The letters are the same as the letters you may type to manually sort a folder with the SortIndex command ($). The letters in the table below are the ones that may show up in the titlebar line.
| A | Arrival |
| S | Subject |
| F | From |
| T | To |
| C | Cc |
| D | Date |
| Z | siZe |
| O | Orderedsubject |
| E | scorE |
| H | tHread |
If the sort order is Reversed, the letter above will be preceded by the letter "R", for example
means that a Reverse Subject sort is in effect. For the case where the sort is in Reverse Arrival order, the "A" is left out, and just an "R" is shown.
This feature is displayed as "Show Sort in Titlebar".
Setting this feature turns off all of Alpine's S/MIME support. You might want to set this if you are having trouble due to the S/MIME support.
This feature is displayed as "S/MIME -- Turn off S/MIME".
This feature only has an effect if your version of Alpine includes support for S/MIME. It affects Alpine's behavior when you send a message. If this option is set, the "Encrypt" option will default to ON when sending messages.
Only the default value is affected. In any case, you may still toggle the Encrypt option on or off before sending with the "E Encrypt" command (provided you have a the public digital ID for the recipient).
This feature is displayed as "S/MIME -- Encrypt by Default".
This feature only has an effect if your version of Alpine includes support for S/MIME. If this option is set, you will only have to enter your passphrase for your private key once during an Alpine session.
This feature is displayed as "S/MIME -- Remember S/MIME Passphrase".
This feature only has an effect if your version of Alpine includes support for S/MIME. It affects Alpine's behavior when you send a message. If this option is set, the "Sign" option will default to ON when sending messages.
Only the default value is affected. In any case, you may still toggle the Signing option on or off before sending with the "G Sign" command (provided you have a personal digital ID certificate).
This feature is displayed as "S/MIME -- Sign by Default".
This feature is displayed as "Sort Default Fcc Folder Alphabetically".
This feature is displayed as "Sort Default Save Folder Alphabetically".
In other words, this is a way to turn on the signature stripping behavior without also turning on the dashes-adding behavior.
Trailing whitespace is of aid to flowed-text-formatted messages, which are generated by default but can be turned off via the quell-flowed-text feature. strip-whitespace-before-send also has the effect of turning off sending of flowed text.
This feature is displayed as "Strip Whitespace Before Sending".
User-Agent header in outgoing messages.
This feature is displayed as "Tab Checks for Recent Messages".
Setting this feature causes Alpine to search for Unseen messages instead of Recent messages. Unseen messages remain Unseen until you view them (or flag then as Seen with the Flag Command). Setting this feature allows you to locate messages you have not read instead of only recently received messages. When this feature is set, the feature Enable-Fast-Recent-Test will have no effect, so the checking may be slower.
Another reason why you might want to use this feature is that Alpine sometimes opens folders implicitly behind the scenes, and this clears the Recent status of all messages in the folder. One example where this happens is when Saving or filtering a message to another folder. If that message has some keywords set, then because of some shortcomings in the IMAP specification, the best way to ensure that those keywords are still set in the saved copy of the message is to open the folder and set the keywords explicitly. Because this clears the Recent status of all messages in that folder the folder will not be found by the NextNew command unless this feature is set.
Setting this feature causes Alpine to skip the messages flagged as Important, and select Unread messages exclusively. Tab behavior when there are no new messages left to select remains unchanged.
An example would be the Up Arrow key on the keyboard. Up Arrow is not a distinct character on most Unix systems. When you press the Up Arrow key a short sequence of characters are produced. This sequence is supposed to be described in the termcap database by the "ku" capability (or by the "kcuu1" capability if you are using terminfo instead of termcap).
By default, Alpine defines some terminal escape sequences that are commonly used. For example, the sequence "ESC O A" is recognized as an Up Arrow key. The sequence "ESC [ A" is also recognized as an Up Arrow key. These are chosen because common terminals like VT100's or ANSI standard terminals produce these sequences when you press the Up Arrow key.
If your system's termcap (terminfo) database assigns some other function to the sequence "ESC O A" it is usually ignored by Alpine. Also, if your termcap (terminfo) database assigns a sequence which doesn't begin with an escape character (ESC) it is usually ignored by Alpine. This usually works fine because most terminals emit the escape sequences that Alpine has defined by default. We have also found that it is usually better to have these defaults take precedence over the definitions contained in the database because the defaults are more likely to be correct than the database.
There are some terminals where this breaks down. If you want Alpine to believe the definitions given in your termcap (terminfo) database in preference to the defaults the Alpine itself sets up, then you may turn this feature on. Then, sequences of characters which are defined in both termcap (terminfo) and in Alpine's set of defaults will be interpreted the way that termcap (terminfo) says they should be interpreted. Also, if your terminal capabilities database assigns a sequence which doesn't begin with escape, it will not be ignored.
Details:
By default, Alpine will attempt to connect to an IMAP server on the normal IMAP service port (143), and if the server offers "Transport Layer Security" (TLS) and Alpine has been compiled with encryption capability, then a secure (encrypted) session will be negotiated.
With this feature enabled, before connecting on the normal IMAP port, Alpine will first attempt to connect to an alternate IMAP service port (993) used specifically for encrypted IMAP sessions via the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) method. If the SSL attempt fails, Alpine will then try the default behavior described in the previous paragraph.
TLS negotiation on the normal port is preferred, and supersedes the use of SSL on port 993, but older servers may not provide TLS support. This feature may be convenient when accessing IMAP servers that do not support TLS, but do support SSL connections on port 993. However, it is important to understand that with this feature enabled, Alpine will attempt to make a secure connection if that is possible, but it will proceed to make an insecure connection if that is the only option offered by the server, or if the Alpine in question has been built without encryption capability.
Note that this feature specifies a per-user (or system-wide) default behavior, but host/folder specification flags may be used to control the behavior of any specific connection. This feature interacts with some of the possible host/folder path specification flags as follows:
The /tls host flag, for example,
will over-ride this feature for the specified host by bypassing the SSL connection attempt. Moreover, with /tls specified, the connection attempt will fail if the service on port 143 does not offer TLS support.
The /ssl host flag, for example,
will insist on an SSL connection for the specified host, and will fail if the SSL service on port 993 is not available. Alpine will not subsequently retry a connection on port 143 if /ssl is specified.
This feature is displayed as "Use Current Directory".
Normally, the starting position for an incoming folder (which most Stay Open folders will likely be) is controlled by the Incoming-Startup-Rule. However, if a folder is a Stay Open folder, when you re-enter the folder after the first time the current message will be the same as it was when you left the folder. An exception is made if you use the TAB command to get to the folder. In that case, the message number will be incremented by one from what it was when you left the folder.
The above special behavior is thought to be useful. However, it is special and different from what you might at first expect. If this feature is set, then Stay Open folders will not be treated specially as far as the startup rule is concerned.
The standard specifies that this header line should be labeled Sender, not X-X-Sender. Setting this feature causes Sender to be used instead of X-X-Sender. The standard also states that the data associated with this header field should not be used as a Reply address. Unfortunately, certain implementations of mail list management servers will use the Sender address for such purposes. These implementations often even recognize the X-Sender fields as being equivalent to the Sender field, and use it if present. This is why Alpine defaults to X-X-Sender.
Note, PC-Alpine always adds either an X-X-Sender line if there is an open, remote mailbox, or an X-Warning: UNAuthenticated User otherwise
This feature is displayed as "Use Sender Instead of X-X-Sender".
When the enable-suspend feature is set and subsequently the
^Z key is pressed,
Alpine will normally suspend itself and return temporary
control to Alpine's parent shell process.
However, if this feature is set, Alpine will instead create an
inferior subshell process.
This is useful when the parent process is not intended to be used
interactively.
Examples include invoking Alpine via the -e argument
of the Unix xterm program, or via a menu system.
Note that one typically resumes a suspended Alpine by entering the Unix fg command, but if this feature is set, it will be necessary to enter the exit command instead.
Setting this feature tells Alpine to use the system-supplied routines to perform these tasks instead. In particular there are three tasks and three system routines that will be used for these tasks.
To convert from multi-byte to Unicode the routine
is used. To convert from Unicode to multi-byte the routine
is used. And to find the screen width a particular Unicode character will occupy the routine used is
This feature has been only lightly tested. The internal routines should normally be used unless you run into a problem that you think may be solved by using the system routines. Note that your environment needs to be set up for these routines to work correctly. In particular, the LANG or LC_CTYPE variable in your environment will need to be set.
This feature is displayed as "Use Vertical Folder List".
This feature is closely related to fcc-only-without-confirm. Alpine will normally ask if you want to copy a message only to the Fcc. This feature also applies to cases where there is a Bcc but still no To, Cc, or Newsgroup. If the Fcc-Only-Without-Confirm feature is set and you are sending a message with only an Fcc, then you won't be asked about sending with a blank To and Cc and Newsgroups header even if this feature is set. Similarly, if you have already been asked if you want to send to the Fcc only and you have answered Yes, then you won't be asked again about sending with blank To, Cc, and Newsgroups headers even if this feature is set.
This group is usually correct but may be changed by system managers or users in special cases.
System managers are usually interested in setting these in the system-wide configuration files, though users may set them if they wish.
The tokens are used as they appear below for the Index-Format option, but they must be surrounded by underscores for the Reply-Leadin option, in signature and template files, and in the target of Filter Rules.
If you are using a threaded view of the index and this message is at the top of a collapsed portion of a thread, then this token refers to all of the messages in the collapsed portion of the thread instead of just the top message. The first character will be a '*' if any of the messages in the thread are marked Important, else a '+' if any of the messages are addressed to you, else a '-' if any of the messages are cc'd to you. The third character will be a 'D' if all of the messages in the collapsed thread are marked deleted, an 'A' if all of the messages in the collapsed thread are marked answered, it will be an 'N' if any of the messages are undeleted and unseen, and it will be blank otherwise.
If you are using a threaded view of the index and this message is at the top of a collapsed portion of a thread, then this token refers to all of the messages in the collapsed portion of the thread instead of just the top message. The first character is '+', '-', or blank depending on whether any of the messages in the collapsed thread are addressed to you or cc'd to you. The third character will be '*' if any of the messages are marked Important. The fourth character will be 'N' if all of the messages in the thread are New, else 'n' if some of the messages in the thread are New, else blank. The fifth character will be 'A' or 'a' or blank, and the sixth character will be 'D' or 'd' or blank.
If you are using a threaded view of the index and this message is at the top of a collapsed portion of a thread, then the fourth character will be 'N' if all of the messages in the thread are unseen and recent; else 'n' if some of the messages in the thread are unseen and recent; else 'U' if all of the messages in the thread are unseen and not recent; else 'u' if some of the messages in the thread are unseen and not recent; else 'R' if all of the messages in the thread are seen and recent; else 'r' if some of the messages in the thread are seen and recent; else blank.
whereas the SUBJKEYINIT token would give
Only those keywords that you have defined in your Keywords option in Setup/Config are considered in the list. In other words, keywords that have been set by some other means, perhaps by another email program, won't show up unless included in Keywords. The keyword-surrounding-chars option may be used to modify this token slightly. It is also possible to color keywords in the index using the Setup/Kolor screen.
| 1 | Highest |
| 2 | High |
| 4 | Low |
| 5 | Lowest |
You may color this token with the Index Priority Colors options.
would insert the literal text "abc=" (without the quotes) into the index display line. You must quote the text if it includes space characters, like
would display the text of the X-Spam header, if any. Like for other index tokens a width field may (and probably should) follow this.
displays the first ten characters of the X-Spam header. Unlike other index tokens, the syntax for HEADER is more flexible. An optional second argument comes after a comma inside the parentheses. It specifies the "field" number. By default, the field separator is a space character. No extra space characters are allowed in the argument list.
would display the second field, left-justified, in a 10 character wide field. The second field would consist of all the text after the first space up to the next space or the end of the header. The default field number is zero, which stands for the entire line. There is also an optional third argument which is a list of field separators. It defaults to a space character. The example
would cause the field separators to be any of colon, percent, or space (there is a space character between the percent and the right parenthesis). The first field runs from the start of the header value up to the first colon, percent, or space; the second goes from there to the next; and so on. In order to use a comma character as a field separator you must escape it by preceding it with a backslash (\). The same is true of the backslash character itself. There is one further optional argument. It is an R or an L to specify right or left adjustment of the text within the field. The default is to left justify, however if you are displaying numbers you might prefer to right justify.
Here's an example of a SpamAssassin header. The exact look of the header will vary, but if your incoming mail contains headers that look like the following
you might want to display the hits value. The first field starts with the Y in Yes. To get what you're interested in you might use "=" and space as the field separators and display the third field, like
or maybe you would break at the dot instead
Another example we've seen has headers that look like
Because there are two equals and a comma before the 7% and a comma after it, the token
should display the probability (for example 7% or 83%) right justified in a 3-wide field.
in the ARROW token's field. For all of the non-current messages, the ARROW field will be filled with blanks. If you use the fixed-field width feature the length of the "arrow" may be adjusted. The arrow will be drawn as width-1 dashes followed by a greater than sign. For example, if you use ARROW(3) you will get
and ARROW(1) will give you just
It is also possible to set the color of the ARROW field. By default (and for non-current messages) the arrow is colored the same as the index line it is part of. You may set it to be another color with the Index Arrow Color option available from the Setup Kolor screen.
There is a limited if-else capability for including text. The if-else condition is based on whether or not a given token would result in replacement text you specify. The syntax of this conditional inclusion is
The left parenthesis must follow the underscore immediately, with no intervening space. It means the token is expanded and the results of that expansion are compared against the "match_this" argument. If there is an exact match, then the "if_matched" text is used as the replacement text. Otherwise, the "if_not_matched" text is used. One of the most useful values for the "match_this" argument is the empty string, "". In that case the expansion is compared against the empty string.
Here's an example to make it clearer. This text could be included in one of your template files:
If that is included in a template file which you are using while replying to a message (because you chose to use the role it was part of), and that message has a newsgroup header and a newsgroup in that header, then the text
will be included in the message you are about to compose. On the other hand, if the message you are replying to does not have a newsgroup, then the text
would be included instead. This would also work in signature files and in the "Reply-Leadin" option. If the "match_this", "if_matched", or "if_not_matched" arguments contain spaces, parentheses, or commas; they have to be quoted with double quotation marks (like in the example above). If you want to include a literal quote in the text you must escape the quote by preceding it with a backslash character. If you want to include a literal backslash character you must escape it by preceding it with another backslash.
The comma followed by "if_not_matched" is optional. If there is no "if_not_matched" present then no text is included if the not_matched case is true. Here's another example:
Here you can see that tokens may appear in the arguments. The same is true for tokens with the conditional parentheses. They may appear in arguments, though you do have to be careful to get the quoting and escaping of nested double quotes correct. If this was in the signature file being used and you were replying to a message sent to comp.mail.pine the resulting text would be:
If you were replying to a message which wasn't sent to any newsgroup the resulting text would be a single blank line. The reason you'd get a blank line is because the end of the line is outside of the conditional, so is always included. If you wanted to get rid of that blank line you could do so by moving the end of line inside the conditional. In other words, it's ok to have multi-line "if_matched" or "if_not_matched" arguments. The text just continues until the next double quotation, even if it's not on the same line.
Here's one more (contrived) example illustrating a matching argument which is not the empty string.
If this was the value of your "Reply-Leadin" option and you were replying to a message which was sent today, then the value of the "Reply-Leadin" would be
But if you were replying to a message sent on Oct. 27 (and that wasn't today) you would get
To find out whether your organization has its own LDAP server, contact its computing support staff.
O = <Your Organization Name>, C = US
or it might be blank.
(Some LDAP servers actually ignore anything specified here.)
If in doubt what parameters you should specify here, contact the maintainers of the LDAP server.
389 will be used.
If an LDAP lookup of "William Clinton" normally returns an entry with an address of pres@whitehouse.gov, then you might put an entry in your address book that looks like:
Nickname Address
bill "William Clinton"
Now, when you type "bill" into an
address field in the composer Alpine will
find the "bill" entry in your address book.
It will replace "bill" with
"William Clinton".
It will then search for an entry with that nickname
in your address book and not find one. If this feature
is set, Alpine will then attempt to lookup
"William Clinton" on the LDAP server and find the entry with address
pres@whitehouse.gov.
A better way to accomplish the same thing is probably to use the feature save-search-criteria-not-result.
The way this actually works is that instead of saving the email address in your address book, Alpine saves enough information to look up the same directory entry again. In particular, it saves the server name and the distinguished name of the entry. It's possible that the server administrators might change the format of distinguished names on the server, or that the entry might be removed from the server. If Alpine notices this, you will be warned and a backup copy of the email address will be used. You may want to create a ne