Using AlPine With Gmail

Many people like the new email clients like thunderbird or my gui favorite sylpheed, but I love old school console based ones. Alpine is a console based email client and here is how to get it to work with your gmail account

First you have to make sure IMAP is enabled in your gmail account. As of this writing GMAIL does not allow this by default. Go to gmail, click settings, click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP link/tab, select Enable IMAP, then save changes

Install Alpine sudo apt-get install alpine, once alpine starts up...

Press M S L A this will bring you to the menus (Main>Setup>colletionLists>Add)

Nickname should be something recognizable such as "gmail"

Server should be imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=USERNAME@gmail.com (replace USERNAME with your account name)...if prompted for your pasword type it in.

Go to the Main Menu by pressing m

Select SETUP

Go into Config c

Select SMTP Server (for sending) and when prompted put in smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=USERNAME@gmail.com (replace USERNAME with your account name)

Go back to the main menu, from there you should be able to compose/send mail and receive as well.

It might take a little getting used to, but once you get used to it console programs are one of the fastest ways of doing tasks and generally function faster (especially on slower connections)