Today I configured pine to read and send gmail. Cool.

create a file .pinerc.gmail with the following contents

smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com/user=USERID@gmail.com/ssl

inbox-path={pop.gmail.com/pop3/ssl/user=USERID@gmail.com}inbox

Then,

pine -p .pinerc.gmail

The first time you run it, pine will insert other configuration stuff into .pinerc.gmail. This is fine. This is the simplest way.