I would like to send emails via Pine (Alpine) but with correct style usage, for instance, underlining book names, etc. How can I create emails in Pine using underline, emphasis, etc. (This can include a variety of receivers of such emails ranging from other Pine users to Outlook to Gmail).
Sending emails in Pine (Alpine) with underline, emphasis
alpine-mailemail-clientformattingunderlining
Related Solutions
An alternate way of importing your Google contacts is using pull_contacts.py.
This script will:
- perform a GData query to retrieve all the contacts; and
- print them in alpine's addressbook format.
So, to add all of your Google contacts to the addressbook, simply:
python pull_contacts.py aphacker@gmail.com >> .addressbook
The main advantage of this method over the one described by DaveParillo is the added support for non-latin1 characters. If you're like me and have a lot of people with accented letters in their names, this script is a God-send -- you won't have to go through the list manually replacing ? with the right latin1 letter.
Note that the script requires the GData libraries.
From Configuring Alpine:
Start by going to the "Setup Configuration" screen (M S C) and find the Folder Preferences section. Under this section, set enable-incoming-folders and restart alpine for the change to take effect. Now go to your Incoming Message Folders (F Incoming-Folders), but don't open your INBOX folder.
Now comes the fun part.
Since you want to add a new folder, type A. You'll be presented with a command-line asking for the "Name of server to contain added folder" and four options below that. We're interested in the options. Since you're going to be pulling mail off of a remote pop3 server, you want to configure a mail drop, which is the last option, thus press Ctrl W. You'll now be asked for the name of the mail drop server (the server you're pulling the mail off of). Enter the server (and port number if you desire), your username (which may or may not include part of the server address), and pop3. When done, you should have something that looks like the following:
pop.server.tld:port/user=username@server.tld/pop3
If you are using a secure connection, you will need to add two things to the entry. First, append ssl to the end. When that is done (and assuming you don't want, or are having difficulties setting up, certificate validation), add novalidate-cert just after the mail drop server. Once you are done, you should have something that resembles the following:
pop.server.tld:port/novalidate-cert/user=username@server.tld/pop3/ssl
Now hit Enter. You'll now be asked for the folder you want to copy the mail from; answer: Inbox.
Next: "Name of server to contain destination folder". Leave this blank, and continue on.
Now for the "Folder to copy mail to". You can name this anything you want, but I generally use the user name of whatever email account I'm setting the mail drop up for.
And I do the same as above for the "Nickname for folder "username"".
And now you have a brand new mail drop folder. To set up more, just repeat as needed.
Alpine e-mail setup also has Alpine setup instructions, including how to set up Gmail using POP3 (including pictures):
This is an example of using POP3 from Gmail. You will need to enable POP3 from your Gmail account under Settings→Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
To create a new incoming folder for POP, use Main Menu→Folder List→Incoming-Folders→Add.
It will prompt to ask you the Name of server to contain added folder:
Name of server to contain added folder: pop.gmail.com:995/novalidate-cert/user=username@gmail.com/pop3/ssl
It will then prompt to ask for the 'Folder on 'pop.gmail.com…" to add:
Folder on "pop.gmail.com.." to add: INBOX
Fill in a nickname:
Nickname for folder "INBOX" : INBOX at gmail.com
It will then connect to gmail server and will prompt for the username@gmail.com password. Enter it, and the INBOX will open.
Best Answer
Pine/Alpine does not support composing messages in HTML (which is the only rich text format supported for email nowadays).
In plain-text media (IRC, non-HTML email), it is very common to use
_
and*
to denote emphasis._word_
can be interpreted as either italic or underlined, and*word*
usually means bold text. Sometimes,/word/
is used for italics.Some mail readers even detect such markup and format text accordingly; an example is Thunderbird. This website does so too.