PC-Pine: Pine on your personal computer

PC-Pine puts the functionality and familiar interface of Pine on the personal computer. An advantage of using PC-Pine over Pine on a Unix host is the ability to attach files that reside on the PC's disk - for example, spreadsheets, word processing documents, or graphics - to email messages without the need to first upload those files to another host. Conversely, email messages sent to you with attached files can be read on your PC, and the attached files immediately saved to your PC's disk.

PC-Pine is now available for Windows/Winsock in both 16 and 32 bit versions, as well as the following DOS versions: packet driver, Novell LWP, FTP PC-TCP, Sun PC-NFS. Only the 32bit Windows version has full caching enabled; thus it should be noticeably faster than the DOS and 16bit Windows versions. Sorting is still slow, however.
Some specific limitations of the DOS version (these do not apply to the Windows/Winsock version of PC-Pine):

   o The unix-pipe-cmd function is not available.
   o There is no spelling checker.
   o Alternate editor function is not available.
   o Memory: the DOS version needs about 500K out of 640K.
   o The DOS version can't run image viewer from within Pine, due to memory.
   o Messages (excluding attachments) must fit in DOS memory;
     However, attachments may be any size.
Additional notes:

-The Windows/Winsock version of PC-Pine is not a full GUI Windows
 application; however, version 3.92 introduces quite a few GUI
 amenities, including scroll bars, pull-down menus, expanded mouse
 support, etc.

-While message folders may be either local or remote, several support
 files must be available on the local disk.  In particular your
 PINERC config file, ADDRBOOK, NEWSRC, and PINE.SIG your signature file.
 Other files (postponed and interrupted messages, debug files) are also
 stored locally.  Some users of both PC-Pine and Unix Pine must worry
 about keeping their pinerc, address book, and newsrc files in sync.
 This may be done using remote file system protocols or manual copying.
 Remote access to these support files is *definitely* planned for the future.

-The PC-PINE message folder format is based on byte-counts for maximum
 efficiency, so they must not be edited. The format is non-standard, but
 conversion utilities would not be difficult. This format is supported in
 Unix Pine as well.  PC-Pine can also open Unix-style folders for
 READ-ONLY access.

-Don't expect to display a picture without exiting PC-Pine for DOS, due
 to DOS memory limitations.  In some configurations, there *may* be enough
 memory for the viewer and a small image, but don't count on it.  With
 PC-Pine for Windows/Winsock, the memory constraints are greatly
 diminished, and viewing image attachments seems to work quite well.  We
 have been testing with the "lview" package by Leonardo Loureiro, which
 can be obtained from the OAK Software Repository or any other
 SimTel mirror site.
PC-Pine can be downloaded from the anonymous FTP host ftp.cac.washington.edu, in the directory /pine/pcpine; here, you will also find instructions, including which file you need to download for your PC's particular network connection software.

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