Pine (or alpine) with gmail

I use gmail for just about everything mail related since it’s more reliable than any provider anywhere it seems.
the only downfall is that it’s not a straight POP3 for security reasons, which means your not just going to go cleartext with a console-app that does pop3 email.
SOOOOO I like the application “pine”, which is console only, and is a wonderful little utility for quick, simple, easy to read email along with composing, etc. It just needs configuring to work with Gmail.

After a bit of searching to do this since I’m about lazy, I ran across this. These are instructions on the configuration of pine (or the alternative, alpine). NOTE: I use Linux, a type of UNIX operating system. It’s not a windows application.

Instructions:

First enable IMAP on your Google account!!!
-Log into Google and click “settings”,
-Click “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”
-Under IMAP Access click “Enable IMAP”

Your .pinerc needs to be like this:

user-id=your.username at gmail.com
user-domain=gmail.com

smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=your.username at gmail.com

(all on one line)
inbox-path={imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=your.username at gmail.com}INBOX

(all on one line)
incoming-folders=your.username at gmail.com {imap.gmail.com:993/novalidate-cert/ssl/user=your.username at gmail.com}
(you probably have to check “enable-incoming-folders” in your Pine Setup, Config as well)

(all on one line)
folder-collections=”your.username at gmail.com” {imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/user=your.username at gmail.com}[]

You can invoke pine using an alternate .pinerc like so:
pine -p .pinerc_gmail
You can’t use /afs/isis/pkg/pine/bin/pine because it’s configured to fix settings for smtp-server and user-domain back to UNC’s. So you can read your Gmail with it but when you send e-mail things get confusing.