A Basic Guide to Using pine on unix

This is a simple tutorial on how to pine on stat to read your email. This page is geared to people who normally use Eudora, but for a certain instance have to use mordor.stat.ohio-state.edu.

First log into mordor.stat.ohio-state.edu:

                     Department of Statistics
                    The Ohio State University

login: your_username
Password: xxxxxxxx
Last login: Mon Aug 30 09:56:06 from mordor.stat.ohio
Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.7       Generic October 1998
You have mail.
Hit ^C to change terminal type
Terminal: xterm. 
Erase set to backspace
/home/your_username
mordor> 

At the prompt type pine. The first time you run pine it will give you a greeting screen. Hit e to exit the greeting.

Pine will then go into its main menu screen. In any of pine's screen there is always a list of valid key sequences at the bottom of the screen. Even in its editor, pico, this list is present. At most points in pine you can press m to go to the main menu. From here you can send a new message or look at your mail in your INBOX.

If you hit i you will see the index of you inbox. The messages are put here in cronological order. Normally, the bottom message is highlighted with a bar that can be moved up and down with the arrow keys. A small help menu with common keys appears at the bottom of the screen, for a full help menu you can hit ?.

If you hit r to reply to the selected message, you will be prompted to include the original message. This means do you want a copy of the message you are replying to in your message. Then you will be prompted for a subject, and who you want to cc the message to. (Note: your eudora aliases will not be available in pine, and vice versa.)

After this you will be dumped into an editor called pico. You can type your message, and use the arrow keys to move around. When you are finished to save and quit, press x while pressing the control key. (This is called ^x.)

Next you will be given a menu asking if you want to send the message, normally you just hit y.