Pine Praised as the Email Manager for Everyone

Ask electronic mail users around the UW community to name their mailer of choice and the answer, more than likely, will be Pine. Conceived in 1989 as a simple, easy-to-use mailer for UW people who were not technology enthusiasts, Pine quickly gained popularity as a user-friendly alternative to the sometimes cryptic Unix mailer. Pine eventually spread to the world outside the UW.

In the July 1994 issue of Open Computing magazine, Tom Yager gave Pine high praise in his article "Email for the Rest of Us." Yager, a contributing editor who writes the PC-Unix Connection column, reports that everybody is getting into Unix these days. But he laments that functionality too often is sacrificed for simplicity.

"Can't anyone create something that is simple and capable?" he asks. "Someone has, and that something is called Pine. This email manager, developed by the University of Washington, is a virtually commercial-quality application--with source code available for free to the public. It is such a laudably well-designed work that . . . if you use Unix to send and receive email, you really must get Pine."

Yager reports that Pine does everything you'd expect a mail program to do (read, send, and archive), and lauds its ability to manage addresses and lists with a concise text interface. After retrieving the Pine source code and compiling it on his own Unixware 1.1 lab system, Yager had a hands-on look at Pine. What did he find? "Pine not only typifies excellent interface design, but also incorporates features that rival commercial email managers," he reports.

After noting that the invisible portions of Pine are just as intriguing as the front end, and discoursing on the ease and usefulness of the mail protocols, Yager cuts to the bottom line: "Lest Pine's price tag fool you into thinking it's beset with bugs and missing features, take heart. It's one of the most solid and capable public-domain programs I've seen in a long time." [Editor's note: Pine is not actually in the public domain, but it is freely available.]

Yager goes on to praise the Pico editor as "another hidden jewel of Pine," and he cites the overall user friendliness of Pine by saying that it's typical that Pine "never makes you type something when it can be chosen from an on-screen list."

He describes the Pine main menu as "blissfully simple," and says of the Pine address book: "You'll never have to type a complex Internet email address more than once."

Get lost in Pine? Not easy, says Yager. "Typing `?' from nearly anywhere will get you a few screens of helpful text," he explains, noting the embedded context-sensitive help system.

"Pine is such a quality piece of work that even your experienced users will find themselves using it as a matter of course," he predicts. "Their affection, and mine, for Pine is for its just-right balance of functionality and ease of use. I hope others, both in the academic and commercial development communities, will take a page from Pine and build applications that everyone can use."

The Pine team members are not resting on these laurels, however. They are continuing to develop ever-more-helpful versions of Pine.

Pine's Main Menu is familiar to email users at the UW and around the world.