Alpine email

Computer-based calendars are very useful, and the Google Calendar is probably one of the more widely used personal calendars other than scheduling programs such as MS Outlook and Groupwise (both of which are broken). But, webby gooey applications can be rather bothersome because they tend to take up a lot of screen real estate and other resources, and on smaller screens such as a laptop can be rendered virtually useless by all that added functionality built into the web browser itself as well as the calendar page. It is quite possible that on your laptop, your Google Calendar may look…

By now I assume you've experimented with Alpine, as a character-based email client. Well, I have another tip for you. I have been using alpine almost exclusively for a few weeks now. I switch to Evolution now and then because it is easier to gather groups of emails and move them to storage folders, etc. in a fully GUI program, but for the most part, if you have been communicating with me via email at all over the last few weeks, you have to imagine me on this end looking at a terminal window, using a character based program, mouse-free, typing rather than clicking. I've provided a few…

By default, the text-based email client 'alpine' requests a password the first time, per session, that it is requested a password from any email services it checks. For the duration of that session, it remembers the password, but forgets it if you quit alpine so you have to enter it again later. From a security point of view, that is probably a good thing, but most people do like to have their email client remember the password between sessions. The way this works in alpine seems a little obscure at first, but actually makes a lot of sense. Alpine checks for a file in which passwords should…

For today's Linux Hint: How to pick which browser will open when you pick a link while using apine in Ubuntu. Sometimes there is a URL in an email that you want to visit. In a GUI email brower, you click on it with the mouse. In apine you navigate to the link with the usual navigation keys (but the first link will already be selected for you) and hit enter to open the link. The default that alpine comes with, at least on my machine, seems to be the Epiphany browser I have no idea why. And when it goes there, it opens the browser and freezes the alpine screen, so I have to close the…

If you are using alpine as your email client, you may find that hitting ctrl-T to invoke a spell checker does not work, in alpine 1.0 as installed in Ubuntu. It is easy to fix. I looked around for the answer to this question, but it is a bit esoteric so there is very little, and what there is stands mainly as examples of the down side of community support. People state that the spell checker is not working, and others answer with various bits of advice that do not work at all because they are nothing other than vague guesses that do not address the problem. It is possible, even probable,…