Reading Email with Pine: Reading Email

Reading email is as simply as accessing your INBOX folder and selecting the message you want to read and hitting enter.

Like with all screens in pine, every screen has the help menu at the bottom of the screen and the status bar at the top of the screen. The central part of the screen changes depending on the location. The status bar will reflect your current location in pine all the time. The help menu also changes to reflect the commands that are available depending on the location within the program. The INBOX is a folder in pine. Therefore, you would first access the Folder List and then access the folders and select the INBOX. Displaying the folder will display the messages in the INBOX. Please note the messages tagged with a N in the left column. These are new messages that you have not read.

Note: In the Folder Index of the INBOX, some messages may be tagged with an A, D, N or a + (plus) sign in the left hand column before the message number. These status tags are described below:
A : Answered
D : Marked to be deleted
N : New Message
+ : Message was directly addressed to you rather than via a mailing list.
No Tag : Message has been read.

Keyboard Commands useful while reading email:

Navigating between messages and folders:

• To see the index of message in your inbox (while reading a message), hit I
• To see the list of folders (while reading a message or in the index), hit L
• To go to the Main Menu from any place, hit M
• While reading a message, hit P for previous message and N for the next message.
• To read the next page, hit the Space bar and to go to the previous page, hit - (the dash) key.

Sorting messages:

• Use the $ key to invoke the sorting commands. You have the option of sorting by Subject, Arrival, From, To, Date, CC, Size, OrderedSubj and Reverse sort.

Deleting messages:

• If you hit the D key while reading a message or in the index, the message is marked to be deleted. It will be actually deleted when you exit from pine.

Searching for Messages

• To search for messages invoke the Whereis command by hitting the W key. Simply type in the word you are searching for and hit enter.

From the Main Menu, you will see that Folder Index is highlighted. Hit Enter at this time.

You will get this screen which lists folder collections and News Collections. Hit enter on Folder Collections' "Select Here to See Expanded List".

You will get this screen which lists all the folders in the folder collection. You will notice that "Inbox" is highlighted. The Inbox is the folder where all incoming mail is stored. There are two additional folders (sent-mail and saved-messages). If this is the first time you are using pine, these additional folders will be empty. Hit Enter at this time.

You will get a list of all the mail in your inbox. To read email, all you have to do is to select the message you want to read by moving the highlight bar using the arrow keys (up and down) and hitting enter.

To read your email, all you have to do is select the message by moving the highlight bar using the arrow keys and hitting enter on the selected message.