Some notes on setting up Alpine (which is sometimes more efficient than Mutt for handling IMAP over a slow Internet connection) Address book ------------ To convert Mutt aliases to Alpine address book, use this command (WARNING: overwrites existing Alpine address book) grep ^alias .muttrc | sed -e 's/^alias \([^ ][^ ]*\) \([^<][^<]*\)<\([^>]*\)>$/\1'$'\t''\2'$'\t''\3/' -e 's/^alias \([^ ][^ ]*\) \([^ ]*@[^ ]*\)$/\1'$'\t\t''\2/' | tr -d '"' | grep -v ^alias > .addressbook Folders ------- In .pinerc, as well as setting inbox-path, smtp-server etc you might want to set this to use remote folders without having to qualify them: folder-collections={imap.example.net}[] but note that default-fcc is then a remote folder; if you want to omit attachments when writing to it, change any "no-fcc-without-attachments" to "fcc-without-attachments" in feature-list (that saves having to use ImapFix to do it). You might also want to set "mark-fcc-seen" in feature-list. Also if you don't want Alpine to take over organising your old messages, make sure to use the setting: pruning-rule=no-no Postponing messages locally --------------------------- If your Internet connection fails while you are writing a message, Alpine can be awkward. To work around this, set postponed-folder=/path/to/.alpine-postponed to have Alpine write postponed messages to a file in your local home directory (rather than trying to store them on the server); it is then possible to postpone the current message locally, and resume it once the connection is re-established and Alpine is restarted. Colours ------- Below are some light-on-dark colours for the "color" section of .pinerc. (You might also want to set the composer-wrap-column option to 1 less than the window width you usually use.) normal-foreground-color=yellow normal-background-color=black reverse-foreground-color= reverse-background-color= title-foreground-color=white title-background-color=blue title-closed-foreground-color= title-closed-background-color= status-foreground-color=white status-background-color=blue keylabel-foreground-color= keylabel-background-color= keyname-foreground-color=yellow keyname-background-color=blue selectable-item-foreground-color= selectable-item-background-color= meta-message-foreground-color=yellow meta-message-background-color=black quote1-foreground-color=cyan quote1-background-color=black quote2-foreground-color=magenta quote2-background-color=black quote3-foreground-color=green quote3-background-color=black incoming-unseen-foreground-color= incoming-unseen-background-color= signature-foreground-color=white signature-background-color=blue prompt-foreground-color= prompt-background-color= header-general-foreground-color=cyan header-general-background-color=black index-to-me-foreground-color=cyan index-to-me-background-color=black index-important-foreground-color=red index-important-background-color=black index-deleted-foreground-color=magenta index-deleted-background-color=black index-answered-foreground-color=green index-answered-background-color=black index-new-foreground-color=white index-new-background-color=black index-recent-foreground-color=yellow index-recent-background-color=black index-forward-foreground-color= index-forward-background-color= index-unseen-foreground-color=white index-unseen-background-color=black index-highpriority-foreground-color= index-highpriority-background-color= index-lowpriority-foreground-color= index-lowpriority-background-color= index-arrow-foreground-color= index-arrow-background-color= index-subject-foreground-color= index-subject-background-color= index-from-foreground-color= index-from-background-color= index-opening-foreground-color= index-opening-background-color= viewer-hdr-colors= keyword-colors= Where to find history of this file ---------------------------------- on GitHub at https://github.com/ssb22/config and on GitLab at https://gitlab.com/ssb22/config and on BitBucket https://bitbucket.org/ssb22/config and at https://gitlab.developers.cam.ac.uk/ssb22/config and in China: https://gitee.com/ssb22/config