Using pine for Email and News

Reading email and using the internet newsgroups are important skills because you can submit questions to your instructor via email, and many classes post class information to newsgroups (such as the Data Structures newsgroup called cu.courses.cs2270). Even if you already know these things, you might benefit from learning a tool that organizes both email and newsgroups under a single environment called pine .
Registering Your Mailhome
Since the university has many machines, the first thing you should do is tell us which machine you like to read your mail on. To do this, type the command mailhome and press return. The mailhome command first asks you for your password, and then allows you to set a "new mailstop" for your mail. Type your username followed by "@nag.cs.colorado.edu". For example, if your username is gates, then you would type:

gates@nag.cs.colorado.edu

This long sequence of characters is now your official email address.

Now that you have an official email address, you can impress people at parties. "Yes, send me email. I'm gates at nag dot cs dot colorado dot edu." Actually, if the mailhome command worked correctly, you should be able to get email at the shorter address gates@colorado.edu (or as you can say at the party "gates at colorado dot edu"). Personally, I don't trust mailhome all that much, so if it's someone I really want to get email from, I'll give them the longer address.

Sending Email
For this step, it would help to find someone else in the class. You are going to use the pine mail handler to send them an email message, and they'll send one to you. Start by exchanging email addresses. If you can't find anyone else in the class right now, then you'll have to send email to the President of the United States (he told me at a party that his address is president@whitehouse.gov, really!). In any case, to send the email you should type the command pine followed by the return key. If this is the first time that you've run the pine program, then pine will create a few files to store information, and then it might ask if you'd like extra information sent to you about how to use pine. You may answer Y or N--it's up to you.

Once pine gets going, it will display a main menu with several options to choose from. You want to choose C to compose and send mail. The screen will clear, and the cursor will appear at a highlighted prompt "TO:". Type the address of the person that you are sending mail to. This can be another student in the class, or the President. Anyway, type the address, and press return.

The cursor moves to the next prompt, "Cc:" On this line you can write the address of anyone else that you want to get a copy of your message. Just for fun, why don't you send yourself a copy of this message. Type your own email address and press return.

The next prompt says "Attachmnt:" This option is supposed to let you attach another file, perhaps a picture or sound file. You should be warned that the recipient of your message is unlikely to be able to read the attachment unless they are also using the pine mail handler. Just press return for now, leaving this line blank.

The fourth prompt says "Subject:". You can type a one-line description of the subject of this message.

Finally you are ready to type your email message. In my opinion, many people are impolite in email, but perhaps you can change the trend. Start with a nice salutation ("Dear Bill, ...") and finish up with your best wishes. When you are done typing the message, give the send command (which is listed as ^X at the bottom of the screen, meaning CTRL-X). That's it. Your mail has been sent. You can exit pine with the Q command, and wait for a reply.

Reading Your Email
The pine program also lets you read your email. From the main menu, type I. An index list of your messages appears. In this list, move the highlighted line to the message that you want to read, and press return. There should be at least one message there--the copy of the message that you just sent to your friend, or to me, or to the president.

That's pretty much all there is to using pine. The currently available commands are always listed at the bottom of the screen. The one important command that I always remember is I, which takes you back to the "index list"--i.e., the list of your mail messages.

Setting Up Pine to Read Newsgroups
A newsgroup is a collection of articles and notes written by people that share a common interest. From your university machine, you have access to thousands of newsgroups. The pine mail reader also provides access to these newsgroups.

There are a couple preliminaries that need to be carried out to set up pine for reading newsgroups. You only need to carry out these preliminary steps once. Start up pine, and type S from the main menu. From the small "setup" menu that appears, type C (to Configure pine). Use the arrow keys to move the highlighted line down to nntp-server, and press A to add a new value on this line of the pine configuration. Pine will ask you to enter the line to be added. You should type:

news.cs.colorado.edu

After you type this name, press return, and then type E to return to the main menu. Finally, press Q to quit the pine program. The next time that you start pine, you'll be able to access newsgroups.

Adding a Newsgroup to Your List
Now, restart pine, and press L from the main menu. This takes you to a list of mail folders and newsgroup folders. If you are in the Data Structures class, then you should add the class newsgroup to you list of newsgroups. To do this, move the highlighted line down below "News-collection". Then press A (to add a new newsgroup). You will be asked to enter a group, and you can type the name of the Data Structures group:

cu.courses.cs2270

Selecting a Newsgroup to Read
Now you will tell pine that you want to read our class newsgroup. You'll need to do this whenever you want to read our newsgroup. From the folder list screen, start by highlighting the line below "News-collection". Then press return. The highlighted line will change to a list of all the newsgroups that you have subscribed to. This will include cu.courses.cs2270, and maybe some other groups that the systems people thought you would interest you. Anyway, move the highlight to our class group, and press return.

The screen now changes to a list of all the messages in our class newsgroup. Some of these messages may be leftover from last semester, and you can delete these by typing D at each message until you reach an introductory message for the current semester with a subject such as "Welcome to the CSCI 2270 Bulletin Board (Fall 1997)."

The list of bulletin board messages is a lot like the list of your mail messages, and your options are also similar to mail message options. You can view messages, export a copy of a message to a file, delete messages, and even reply to a message. When you reply to a message, you'll be asked whether you want your reply to go to the newsgroup. If you send your reply to the newsgroup, then everyone will be able to read your reply.

You may also post a message to a newsgroup directly, without replying to another message. Just select the newsgroup as if you were going to read messages, and press C (the compose command).

Fixing pine So That You Can Use It Over a Modem
If you log on to the undergraduate machines via a modem, you may find that pine goes crazy. I have written a short program to fix this problem. You only need to run the program once, from the Unix command line, by typing: "~main2270/bin/fixpine".

Michael Main (main@colorado.edu)