Pine (
http://www.washington.edu/pine/)
Pine is a program for Internet News & Email: a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. Pine was developed by UW Technology at the University of Washington. Though originally designed for inexperienced email users, Pine has evolved to support many advanced features, with an ever-growing number of configuration and personal-preference options.
Pine uses Internet message protocols (e.g. RFC-822, SMTP, MIME, IMAP, NNTP).
Pine's message composition editor, Pico, is also available as a separate standalone program. Pico is a very simple and easy-to-use text editor offering paragraph justification, cut/paste, and a spelling checker.
Features include:
* Online help specific to each screen and context
* Message index showing a message summary which includes the status, sender, size, date and subject of messages
* Commands to view and process messages: Forward, Reply, Save, Export, Print, Delete, capture address, and search
* Message composer with easy-to-use editor and spelling checker. The message composer also assists entering and formatting addresses and provides direct access to the address book
* Address book for saving long complex addresses and personal distribution lists under a nickname
* Message attachments via the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) specification. MIME allows sending/receiving non-text objects, such as binary files, spreadsheets, graphics, and sound
* Folder management commands for creating, deleting, listing, or renaming message folders. Folders may be local or on remote hosts
* Access to remote message folders and archives via the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)
* Internet news support via either NNTP or IMAP
* Aggregate operations, e.g. saving a selected set of messages at once.
mutt (
http://www.mutt.org/)
Mutt is a small but very powerful text based program for reading electronic mail under unix operating systems, including support color terminals, MIME, and a threaded sorting mode.
Mutt supports most mail formats (notably both mbox and Maildir) and protocols (POP3, IMAP, etc). It also includes MIME support, notably full PGP/GPG and S/MIME integration.
Features include:
* Colour support
* Message threading
* MIME support (including RFC2047 support for encoded headers)
* PGP/MIME (RFC2015)
* Various features to support mailing lists, including list-reply
* Active development community
* POP3 support
* IMAP support
* Full control of message headers when composing
* Support for multiple mailbox formats (mbox, MMDF, MH, maildir)
* Highly customizable, including keybindings and macros
* Change configuration automatically based on recipients, current folder, etc.
* Searches using regular expressions, including an internal pattern matching language
* Delivery Status Notification (DSN) support
* Postpone message composition indefinitely for later recall
* Easily include attachments when composing, even from the command line
* Ability to specify alternate addresses for recognition of mail forwarded from other accounts, with ability to set the From: headers on replies/etc. accordingly
* Multiple message tagging
* Reply to or forward multiple messages at once
* .mailrc style configuration files
* Translation into at least 20 languages
* Small and efficient
Cone (
http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/index.html)
Cone stands for "console newsreader and emailer. Cone is a text-based mail client, which seamlessly handles multiple POP3, IMAP accounts, and local mail folders.
Cone is also a simple newsreader. Cone's interface is foolproof enough to be used by inexperienced users, but it also offers advanced features for power users.
Cone handles multiple mail accounts simultaneously.
Features include:
* Can use the following kinds of mail accounts
o Local mail folders, or maildirs
o Remote POP3 and IMAP mail server accounts
* Experimental SMAP mail server accounts
* Full SSL/TLS support with IMAP, POP3, NNTP, SMTP, and SMAP. SASL CRAM-MD5/CRAM-SHA1 authentication (except for NNTP)
* Built-in editor for creating messages
* Displays HTML mail, with automatic de-moronization
* Full UTF-8 support
* Displays attached images, if invoked from an X terminal, by running Gnome's eog, or KDE's kview image viewer
* Spell checker
* Local and remote (IMAP or SMAP-based) addressbooks
* Remote configuration (share a common configuration between different instances of Cone)
* Supports access to servers through a Socks 5 proxy, using the Courier Socks 5 API toolkit
* Sends mail using an external SMTP server (with/without authentication), or the local sendmail
* PGP/GPG based encryption, and digital signatures
* Simple newsgroup reader
Alpine (
http://www.washington.edu/alpine/)
Alpine (Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email) is a fast, easy to use console based email client, developed at the University of Washington. It is suitable for both the inexperienced email user as well as for the most demanding power user.
Alpine is a screen-oriented message-handling tool. In its default configuration, Alpine offers an intentionally limited set of functions geared toward the novice user, but it also has a large list of optional "power-user" and personal-preference features.
Features include:
* View, Save, Export, Delete, Print, Reply and Forward messages
* Compose messages in a simple editor (Pico) with word-wrap and a spelling checker. Messages may be postponed for later completion
* Full-screen selection and management of message folders
* Address book to keep a list of long or frequently-used addresses. Personal distribution lists may be defined. Addresses may be taken into the address book from incoming mail without retyping them
* New mail checking and notification occurs automatically every 2.5 minutes and after certain commands, e.g. refresh-screen (Ctrl-L)
* On-line, context-sensitive help screens
* Support for MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
* Save MIME objects to files
