Alpine (email client)
 Main menu of Alpine 2.00. |
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| Developer(s) | University of Washington |
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| Initial release | December 20, 2007 |
| Stable release | 2.00 (August 26, 2008) |
| Development status | Standstill |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Email client |
| License | Apache License |
| Website | www.washington.edu/alpine |
Alpine is a free software email client developed at the University of Washington.
Alpine 1.0 was publicly released on December 20, 2007.
The name "Alpine" stands for Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email.
Alpine is a rewrite of the Pine Message System that adds support for Unicode and other features. Alpine is meant to be suitable for both inexperienced email users and the most demanding of power users. Alpine is developed at the University of Washington, as was Pine before it. Alpine can be learned by exploration and the use of context-sensitive help. The user interface can be customized.
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[edit] Licensing
Alpine is licensed under the Apache License, version 2. November 29, 2006 saw the first public alpha release,[1][2] which forms a new approach since the alpha test of Pine was always non-public.
[edit] Features
Alpine shares many common features of console applications, like a rich set of shortcut keys, using keyboard instead of mouse to do all navigation and operation. In fact, all operations in Alpine have corresponding shortcut keys.
Unlike other console applications targeting developers and experienced users, which often require users to edit a configuration file, Alpine lets users change most configuration options within the software. This makes alpine one of the most easy to learn console-based email clients.
Alpine supports IMAP, POP, SMTP and LDAP protocol natively. Although it does not support composing HTML email, it can display emails that only have HTML content as text.
[edit] Future
On 4 August 2008 the University of Washington Alpine team announced[3] that after one more release, incorporating Web Alpine 2.0, they would "shift [their] effort from direct development into more of a consultation and coordination role to help integrate contributions from the community." This is likely to be interpreted that the UW team no longer maintains Alpine,[4] and is leaving development to others. One current continuation is re-alpine.[5]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Ryan Barrett (2006-11-30). "Announcing Alpine 0.8". http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.mail.pine.general/3602. Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ "Alpine FTP download directory". ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/alpine/. Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ Steve Hubert (2011-08-04). "alpine status". http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/2008-August/001071.html. Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ Mark Crispin (2009-08-03). "Re-Alpine 2.01 released". http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/2009-August/002439.html. Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ "re-alpine: The continuation of the Alpine email client from University of Washington". http://re-alpine.sourceforge.net/. Retrieved 2012-01-04.
