[aklug] Re: Switched to Alpine

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Christopher Howard wrote:

> Yes, 'if'. Unfortunately the Alpine training session I attended ended
> right before we got to that. So I'm not sure when I'll get around to it.

I have to wonder if Alpine's extended their roles support to make it more
complicated. I found Pine's implementation relatively straight forward.

> Actually, I really would like it to integrate with Emacs, or at least
> Nano. But I do not know how to do that or if it is even possible.

Several editors use '-f' to indicate foreground mode to make any system
calls calling it a blocking call. I'd be surprised if nano or emacs can't
do the same. In Pine I just set the editor to 'vim -f'.

> After entering my password the first time after turning on Alpine, it says
> "Authentication information missing, attempting plain authentication" or
> something close to that. Then it takes my password again, but the same
> thing happens. Then it works on the third try.
>
> Sometimes it works the first time without problems. (?) Also, this only
> seems to be a problem with one of my IMAP accounts, but does not affect
> another account from a different provider.

I'd be tempted to telnet to port 143 and see if you can figure out what
softwaare they're using. The fact that it's intermittant complicates it,
but it also could be that you're falling back through several authentication
options until you found one that you both supported (i.e., CRAM-MD5,
DIGEST-MD5, etc).

> I'm certainly no expert on the subject, since I've never even used Pine.
> But I was told three things: 1) Better IMAP support; 2) More free license;
> 3) Some university somewhere really relied on Pine, but wanted to create a
> version that would continue to be maintained and improved.

UW is behind both projects, I believe. The better IMAP support bit must
have been driven for interoperability. Pine comes with its own IMAP & POP
servers, so if you used their whole stack it was never much of an option.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Wed Nov 12 08:48:38 2008