In Unix, how do I access my Cyrus or Exchange mail from Pine?

Note: Pine is not available on any central UITS systems. UITS does not support the use of Pine at Indiana University.

Note: If you use Pine to read your Indiana University Exchange mail, you will have only limited access to your account.

The following instructions assume the installation of Pine you are using is at least version 4 and has SSL support compiled in.

To set up Pine on a personal workstation or other Unix computer to read your Cyrus or Exchange mail, follow these steps:

1. Open the ~/.pinerc file in your text editor of choice (e.g., Pico, Emacs, vi). For example, if you are using Pico, at the command prompt enter: pico ~/.pinerc

   Note: If you don't already have a .pinerc file in your home directory, you can create one by starting Pine. This will generate a generic .pinerc, which you can then edit.

2. Find the "smtp-server=" variable, and add the following to the end of the line: mail-relay.iu.edu/ssl/user=username/novalidate-cert

   Replace username with your account's username. For example, if your username is dvader, this line should look like this:

   smtp-server=mail-relay.iu.edu/ssl/user=dvader/novalidate-cert
3. To add your Inbox, find the line "inbox-path=" and add the following to the end of the line: {server/ssl/user=username/novalidate-cert}INBOX

   The variable line should look like:

   inbox-path={server/ssl/user=username/novalidate-cert}INBOX

   Replace server with the name of your IMAP server, and username with your account's username. The server addresses for the Cyrus and Exchange servers are as follows:

   • If you are on Cyrus, type  imap.iu.edu .
   • If you are using Exchange, type imap.exchange.iu.edu .

   For example, if your IMAP server is imap.iu.edu, and your username is dvader, you would enter:

   {imap.iu.edu/ssl/user=dvader/novalidate-cert}INBOX

   Alternatively, you may add your Inbox to the "incoming-folders=" variable. Do this if you receive mail on your local computer in addition to IMAP or you have more than one IMAP account. The format is similar, but you should give your IMAP inbox a nickname. Thus, the syntax is as follows:

   nickname {server/ssl/user=username/novalidate-cert}INBOX

   In this case, nickname can be anything you want it to be. You may have multiple Inboxes listed in the "incoming-folders" variable, separated by commas.

4. Add your saved folders. Find the "folder-collections=" variable, and add the following to it:
   
   
   • If you are adding a Cyrus account: nickname {server/ssl/user=username/novalidate-cert}INBOX.[]
   • If you are adding an Exchange account: nickname {server/ssl/user=username/novalidate-cert}[]

   Replace nickname with whatever name you'd like to give to the saved folder collection. Replace server with your IMAP server, and username with your account's username. Make sure that there are not any line breaks (i.e., that the text stays all on one line). For Cyrus, be sure to add the period and brackets and for Exchange, make sure you add the brackets.

   If user dvader, with an account on imap.iu.edu, wants to name his folder collection Cyrus, he would make the line:

   folder-collections=Cyrus {imap.iu.edu/ssl/user=dvader/novalidate-cert}INBOX.[]

   You may have multiple folder collections, with the collections separated by commas. The first collection in the list will be the default for saves.

5. This might not be necessary in all versions of Pine, but if you receive errors about rsh timing out, set "rsh-open-timeout=" to  0 . Thus, the setting should look like: rsh-open-timeout=0
6. Save your changes, and quit the editor.

Also see:

• At IU, why am I having trouble connecting to my Exchange account via IMAP?