How To: Set up Alpine with Gmail via IMAP.
I have always preferred a text based email client. It just seems far more efficient to me, and it spares me all the html garbage and images people tend to forward my way - I can see the text, and that’s all I need to communicate…right?
Anyway, thanks to GMail supporting IMAP, it’s possible to use Alpine (a FOSS implementation of the non-free PINE email program).
When I initially tried to set it up, I ran into some problems getting it properly configured, so I thought I’d post my config here for others who may want to get this set up.
Change the following lines in your .pinerc file in your home directory with the settings below:
personal-name=Your Name
user-domain=gmail.com
smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com/submit/user=user.name@gmail.com/novalidate-cert
inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/user=user.name@gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert}Inbox
This should be enough to get you up and running, and obviously you can further customize your config if desired.
April 19, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Great! Thanks a lot, saved me a ton of time!
(One thing though, your sidebar cuts off the end of those settings. I had to view the page source to see the ends of the inbox-path and smtp-server settings.)
April 19, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Hi Andrew - thanks for pointing that out - I decreased the font size - hopefully that will help!
April 30, 2008 at 5:40 am
[...] found this tutorial on how to set up alpine to read messages from Gmail. Not very difficult at all. Now that I can [...]