ACITS Pine - Answers

Using Pine with Your UMBS Account

(NOTE: These instructions are for UMBS users who wish to use Pine as their primary mailreader and to read their UMBS mail from the ACITS UNIX or OpenVMS services. For instructions on how to manage UMBS mail with Pine as a secondary mailreader, see "Using Both Pine and Eudora".)

Ordinarily, the University Mailbox Service (UMBS) is accessed by using a POP mail client program (such as Eudora) on a personal computer. If you want to read UMBS mail from a UNIX or VMS system, the recommended way is simply to have your UMBS mail forwarded to the UNIX or VMS system. Do that by running Telnet, connecting to mail.utexas.edu, and selecting the "Forward Mail" option.

However, it is possible to use Pine to access your UMBS mailbox if you have access to ACITS UNIX or OpenVMS services. To do that, you must first change Pine's configuration file (.pinerc on UNIX systems; pine.pinerc on VMS). First, start Pine. Then:

  • Choose (S)etup-> (C)onfig -> (C)hange Value

  • for
    inbox-path =

    insert the following: inbox-path={mail.utexas.edu}inbox
    The curly braces indicate an outside server and must be included.

  • Choose (E)xit Config-> answer (Y)es for Commit Changes?
Quit Pine and start over. When you run Pine again, it will, after a few seconds, prompt you for your user name and password for UMBS. After you have typed those in correctly, Pine will display the main menu and will access your UMBS inbox instead of the inbox on the UNIX or VMS system.

Note to VMS Users: Once you have redefined your inbox path, when you list folder names, you will see only INBOX. To get access to messages in other folders, use the G (Go to Folder) command.

When you send messages while in this mode, the return address of those messages will be the address of the UNIX or VMS system you are using, not the UMBS address. To force Pine to use your UMBS address in the From: line, go back and edit the configuration file (.pinerc or pine.pinerc) and change the line:

user-domain=
to:
user-domain=mail.utexas.edu
CAUTION: Pine will still use the user name from the UNIX or VMS system, not your UMBS mail name. Thus, if those two names are not the same, your return address on messages you send will be incorrect. For example, if:

  • your user name is smith on a UNIX system, but psmith on UMBS, and if
  • you have changed the Pine configuration to user-domain=mail.utexas.edu,

your return address for messages you send from the UNIX system will be smith@mail.utexas.edu--which, of course, is incorrect.



Pine : Introduction Steps Answers
19 September 1997
ACITS at UT Austin
Comments to: remark@cc.utexas.edu