Alpine (mail client)

Alpine

Main menu of Alpine 2.20 in color.
Developer(s)	University of Washington (2007–2009) re-alpine group (2009–2012) Eduardo Chappa (2013–present)
Initial release	December 20, 2007; 9 years ago (2007-12-20)
Stable release	2.21 (March 17, 2017; 7 months ago (2017-03-17))
Written in	C
Available in	English
Type	Email client
License	Apache License
Website	washington.edu/alpine

Alpine is a free software email client developed at the University of Washington.

Alpine is a rewrite of the Pine Message System that adds support for Unicode and other features. Alpine is meant to be suitable for both inexperienced email users and the most demanding of power users. Alpine can be learned by exploration and the use of context-sensitive help. The user interface can be customized.

Alpine shares many common features of console applications, like a rich set of shortcut keys, using keyboard instead of mouse to do all navigation and operation. In fact, all operations in Alpine have corresponding shortcut keys.

Unlike other console applications targeting developers and experienced users, which often require users to edit a configuration file, Alpine lets users change most configuration options within the software. This makes alpine one of the most easy to learn console-based email clients.

Alpine supports IMAP, , SMTP, NNTP and LDAP protocol natively. Although it does not support composing HTML email, it can display emails that only have HTML content as text. Alpine can read and write to folders in several formats, including Maildir, mbox, the mh format used by the mh message handling system, mbx, and mix.

Alpine includes its own editor Pico (Pico stands for PIne COmposer), which includes commands for basic editing of files, such as, search and replace, spelling, and justifying of text, besides cut and paste, and intuitive navigation commands. However, any editor can be used to compose messages in Alpine, using the Editor configuration variable.