Reading MIT mail with pine running locally

This document explains how to set up pine on your local machine to check MIT email. This means you can use pine without having to SSH into Athena.

Why you might want to do this

• You can export messages to, save attachments to, and attach files from your local machine, rather than copying things over to Athena.
• Less lag in the general interface
• You can check your mail by typing "pine", rather than logging in to Athena and doing so.

Installing pine

You can obtain pine from the University of Washington, or get the latest version (all UNIX-based platforms) directly

Plenty of websites explain how to configure and install pine. Here are installation instructions for OS X.

The most important thing to note is that you'll likely want to compile pine with the -DPASSFILE option in order to allow pine to save your password encrypted to disk. This only considered to be safe on single-user systems. If you choose this option, you'll have the choice of saving your MIT password to a designated file so that you can check your mail thereafter without entering your password.

Configuring pine

Information you need

Your Athena username, hence referred to as $USER.

Your incoming mail server, hence referred to as $POBOX.

This should be of the form poNN.mit.edu, where NN is a two-digit number. You can find this out using the hesinfo command on Athena. Log into an Athena machine and type the following,

hesinfo $USER pobox

Example,

> hesinfo eranki pobox
POP PO14.MIT.EDU eranki

And, so, my $POBOX is po14.mit.edu

Required settings

Once you've installed pine, you'll want to configure it to handle MIT mail. Start up pine, and you should now have a file named .pinerc in your home directory. You can either edit this file directly or use pine's configuration screen (type S (Setup), C (Config) to get there), but frankly I find editing the file to be easier. Change the following variables.

.

Variable	Action	Effect
user-domain	mit.edu	Domain for your return address.
smtp-server	outgoing.mit.edu/ssl/novalidate-cert/debug/user=$USER	Enables authentication for outgoing mail.
inbox-path	{$POBOX/ssl/novalidate-cert/debug/user=$USER}inbox	The server by which your emails will be sent.
default-fcc†	sent-mail	The folder to which your sent mail will be saved.
folder-collections*	"MIT Folders" {$POBOX/ssl/novalidate-cert/debug/user=$USER}INBOX.[]	This will load your server-side folders (such as sent-mail, etc.)
alt-addresses	$USER@mit.edu	This will ensure that your email address is recognized as belonging to you. This is essential if you have a different username on your local machine than on Athena‡
†Alternate configurations
default-fcc	""	If we use two solitary double quotes, we won't save messages
*Notes for configuration
folder-collections	This can't be set from the configuration screen. You must go S (Setup), L (Collection lists) to configure this. Type A to add a collection, and enter in the following Nickname: MIT Folders (or whatever) Server: {$POBOX/ssl/novalidate-cert/debug/user=$USER} Path: INBOX. And save your changes.

Phew! With these settings, you can now send and. receive email from MIT. However, there may be one additional problem. If your local username is different from your Athena username, your email will be sent with the wrong return address. For instance, my local username is rajiv, while my Athena username is eranki, and so at this point my email appears to other people to have come from rajiv@MIT.EDU.

‡One last thing

If your local and Athena usernames are the same, then you don't need to worry about this section. Otherwise, we'll need to fix this. Unfortunately, while you can set user-domain in UNIX pine to correct your domain, there is no way to set user-id. There are two ways to do this. The easiest thing to do is just add a value to customized-hdrs as follows,