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.

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This entry was posted on January 16, 2007 at 9:05 pm and is filed under linux tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

12 Responses to “Today I configured pine to read and send gmail. Cool.”

minomo Says:
January 16, 2007 at 11:36 pm | Reply
very good
Lucas Says:
April 4, 2007 at 1:46 am | Reply
Very useful Xiaogang! Thanks for you help!
Jonathan Says:
November 21, 2007 at 11:23 pm | Reply
i am about to try this out using IMAP… intuitively i have altered as follows:

inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/imap/ssl/user=jmsmistral@gmail.com}inbox

is this correct?

thanks
Jonathan Says:
November 21, 2007 at 11:27 pm | Reply
cool, it works, the only thing i would add is to add the following after every instance of imap.gmail.com: /novalidate-cert

i.e. inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/novalidate-cert/imap/ssl/user=jmsmistral@gmail.com}inbox
Brandon Says:
November 24, 2007 at 11:31 pm | Reply
This works perfectly and nobody else out there seems to mention how to do this. Thanks!
Saurabh Samdani Says:
December 3, 2007 at 3:29 am | Reply
It tells me

{Can’t open folder {pop.gmail.com/pop3/ssl/user=saurabh.samdani@gmail.com}inbox: invalid remote specification]

do you know the reason?
xgwang Says:
February 15, 2008 at 7:27 pm | Reply
Jonathan,
Thanks for your imap tip. It works. I also find imap is much faster than pop in scrolling pages in the inbox. I do not know why. imap is the way to go!
In addition, I find it convenient to create a separate folder to hold saved messages
for the gmail account.

folder-collections=/home/xgwang/gmail/[]
xgwang Says:
July 18, 2008 at 5:13 pm | Reply
I learned to use “Labels” on Gmail. “Labels” are virtual folders. It moves emails
from designated senders from “Inbox” to labelled folder automatically. So your “Inbox” are cleaner. All your emails are still in “All Mail” folder.

But with the above setup, Pine only sees “Inbox” of Gmail and you would miss
all the “Labels”. Here is a way to let Pine see all your Gmail folders. It builds
on the method of my previous post, add this line to .pinerc.gmail

folder-collections=/home/xgwang/gmail/[] Gmail {imap.gmail.com/novalidate-cert/user=username_of_gmail/ssl}[]

Then,
pine -p .pinerc.gmail
Now pine shows a new folder “Gmail”. Go into it, you see all your “Labels” folders and “[Gmail]/”. Go into it, you see folders like “All Mail[/]“, “Drafts[/]“.

So everything on the Gmail server is mapped in Pine. Great.

Using Pine as a client for Gmail, I can do as much as I can with the Gmail web client.
Krishnamoorthy.S. Says:
March 3, 2009 at 3:41 pm | Reply
Thanks everyone – I was able to use macports and get alpine; and configured alpine to work with gmail! It was much faster than using Apple’s Mail client.
Januar Says:
April 2, 2009 at 11:34 am | Reply
It doesn’t work for me.

I got error:

[Error sending: Invalid host specifier: smtp.gmail.com/user=userid@gmail.com/ssl]

Note:
I have changed userid into my own account.

Help pls?
- xgwang Says:
  April 5, 2009 at 5:00 pm | Reply
  Januar,
  I am using another set of configurations. It needs specific port numbers.
  
  smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=USERID@gmail.com
  
  inbox-path={imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=USERID@gmail.com}Inbox
  
  It may work for you too.
  Xiaogang
mindbat Says:
December 7, 2011 at 2:59 pm | Reply
Thanks for the tutorial…worked great with alpine for me in Ubuntu!

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