Alpine refuses to save imap password

There is "NewMail FIFO Path" configuration option in alpine. Quoting the help:

You may have Alpine create a FIFO special file (also called a named pipe) where it will send a one-line message each time a new message is received in the current folder, the INBOX, or any open Stayopen Folders. To protect against two different Alpines both writing to the same FIFO, Alpine will only create the FIFO and write to it if it doesn't already exist.

So, I set the option to '/tmp/alpine.fifo', and wrote simple utility to read messages from the FIFO and invoke 'notify-send':

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define FIFO_NAME "/tmp/alpine.fifo"

int main(void)
{   
    char s[512];
    char cmd[512];
    int num;
    int fd = open(FIFO_NAME, O_RDONLY);
    do {
        if ((num = read(fd, s, 300)) == -1)
            perror("read");
        else {
            s[num] = '\0';
            sprintf(cmd, "notify-send -t 0 'New mail:' '%s'", s);
            system(cmd);
        }
    } while (num > 0);

    return 0;
}

Save it to alpine-notifier.c, and compile with 'gcc alpine-notifier.c -o alpine-notifier' command. Start 'alpine-notifier' after alpine is started. Enjoy pop-up notifications.

For clarity, I'm just going to give the directions in terms of what you should add to .pinerc. You can also set all of these setting using the configuration interface if you wish.

To get your mail via IMAP:

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

Include this to make sure you have access to all of the various gmail folders:

folder-collections=Gmail {imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=username@gmail.com}[]

I find this useful to mimic "archiving":

default-saved-msg-folder=[Gmail]/All Mail

To send mail via gmail, you need this in .pinerc:

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

Also, I find that these two settings improve performance a lot:

 rsh-open-timeout=0
 disable-these-authenticators=GSSAPI

If you want alpine to remember your password for you, you can run this command in your home directory:

 touch .pine-passfile

The first time you use alpine after running this command, you will be asked whether you want to save your password for later use each time you enter one.