Alpine (email client)
 Main menu of Alpine 2.00. |
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| Developer(s) | University of Washington |
|---|---|
| Initial release | December 20, 2007 |
| Stable release | 2.10 (January 16, 2013) [±] |
| 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.[citation needed]
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 was 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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Licensing[edit]
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.
Features[edit]
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.
Future[edit]
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.
re-alpine[edit]
One continuation is Re-Alpine (email client).[5] On 20 August 2011, re-alpine became the upstream source for the Debian GNU/Linux alpine package in the development version of Debian.[6] and in 2012, re-alpine replaced alpine in OpenBSD ports.[7]
Alpine 2.10[edit]
On 16 January 2013, long time contributor to the project Eduardo Chappa released version 2.10 of Alpine. The release announcement[8] was posted to the comp.mail.pine Usenet newsgroup.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Ryan Barrett (2006-11-30). "Announcing Alpine 0.8". Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ "Alpine FTP download directory". Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ Steve Hubert (2011-08-04). "alpine status". Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ Mark Crispin (2009-08-03). "Re-Alpine 2.01 released". Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ "re-alpine: The continuation of the Alpine email client from University of Washington". Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- ^ "Change log for "alpine" package in Debian - 2.02-1". Retrieved 2012-10-31.
- ^ "[new] re-alpine". Retrieved 2013-04-08.
- ^ "Alpine 2.10 released!". Retrieved 2013-01-18.
