What is ALPINE?
Alpine is the University of Washington’s “Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email.” It is intended to be an easy-to-use program for sending, receiving, and filing Internet electronic mail messages and Internet News (Usenet) messages. Alpine supports the following Internet protocols and specifications: • SMTP Simple Mail Transport Protocol • MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions • IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol • NNTP Network News Transport Protocol MIME allows you to attach any kind of file to your message, provided that your recipient also has MIME-capable mail software (which is readily available for most types of computers, although some proprietary mail systems do not yet support MIME). IMAP allows access to mailboxes on remote mailservers as if they were local. Although originally designed for inexperienced email users, Alpine has evolved to support many advanced features. There are many (perhaps, too many) configuration and personal-preference optio
