The university I’m at has a webmail format and a PINE format and a webmail format. Normally I use the webmail format, but I occasionally have to use PINE because of system problems or the like.
I do not like using pine. It frustrates me to no end. But for a class this semester, I need to use it some - not for all my e-mail needs, but it will be required at some points.
So I did the telnet thing, got to Pine, checked my e-mail, and managed to start composing a forwarded message. This is not what I intended to do! Just to be safe, I stuck my hotmail address into the “to” line, and made sure all other address lines were empty.
What I really want to do is cancel the message - but I’ll settle for being able to send it over to my hotmail account if that’s what I have to do.
There’s a series of commands at the bottom of the screen:
^C, ^X and the like
I’ve tried typing them exactly as they appear and nothing happens. I’ve tried typing just the letter with the shift key, without the shift key, with the caps lock on and all I’ve gotten is still stuck at this forwarded message page.
Please help me get out of this…I’m becoming more and more frustrated the more I play with it - and I’m sure there’s some simple solution I’m not seeing!
It’s been a while since I’ve used Pine, but I think those keys are meant to be used as ctrl-C and ctrl-X respectively. You should ask your University help desk if they allow the use of an email client lke Outlook Express to retrieve your mail remotely. Ask them for the name of the POP3 and SMTP server. It will be similar to pop.earthlink.net and smtp.earthlink.net.
I am suprised that your University still allows Telnet sessions in, though.
Yes, ^X means hold control and type x, then release control. You should be able to get a help screen in pico (the pine composer, which is the program you use to compose emails) by typing ^H, or control-h.
You really should have gotten a little bit more help if they expect you to use pine, even though it’s a very simple interface compared to most text-mode programs, because it’s so far removed from the graphical world most of us now live in. (Yes, even Linux has adopted Mozilla as a very graphical email client and newsreader.)
Ok, I’m obviously being a computer idiot today. It comes from the frustration, I swear.
I used to be able to handle this fairly easily - it’s all I used for e-mail as an undergrad, but eight years later, I’ve forgotten a lot of it. PeterW, there may be another way to get into the pine system for the university, but I haven’t figured it out. I have to use two different passwords to get in though. I have to use this for this portion of this class, although yes, the university does allow remote access clients, there are other reasons (being that we’re supposed to learn to use all the resources available to us, not knowing what we’ll be faced with in the future).
Lsura: Have you ever manually done an SMTP session via telnet? If they really want you to be able to make use of all your resources, you might find yourself without any client at all, just the RFCs and a telnet client.
Then you’ll have the RFCs describing how to construct a packet and no telnet client.
I check my e-mail with Pine over telnet at NCSU. It’s pretty handy once you get the hang of it. Their servers use the IMAP protocol (which, unlike POP3, keeps the messages stored on their servers so that they can be accessed from any computer). I can also check it through Mozilla Thunderbird, the webmail interface, and countless other media. I’m sure your university has multiple computer help desks that can give you useful information like their POP3/IMAP and SMTP servers.
