Upgrade of Pine and Pico in HKUSUA/HKUSUB

Pine is an integrated electronic messaging program package created and maintained by the Computing & Communications group at the University of Washington. Pico is the easy-to-use editor of the Pine package for composing messages. The Pine package on our Unix host systems are upgraded from Pine 3.96 and Pico 2.9 to Pine 4.05 and Pico 3.4 in February, 1999.

There are many enhancements in this new version. Following are some of the highlights:

New screen navigation commands:

use of "<" for "level up" and ">" for "level down" (i.e., just use the "," and "." keys, no need to use the Shift key)
Optional use of the left and right arrow keys for the same functions as "<" and ">" keys (by setting the "enable-arrow-navigation" feature)

Hierarchical folder (i.e. mailbox) collections:

supports hierarchical folders similar to other GUI-based mail clients

URL recognition and viewer dispatch:

capable of recognizing URLs and launching the external browser

Basic rendering of message bodies in HTML format:

similar to Netscape mail/messenger supporting the basic HTML format mail

Help screens with hyperlinks to other help screens and dynamic content (for example, showing current working directory)
Address-books Improvements

revise address book interface
can store address-book on IMAP server. This permits access to the same addressbook from different computers using Pine (only for Unix Pine and PC-Pine 4.0x or above)

Enhanced functions in GoTo and Save commands, Folder List and Setup screens
Miscellaneous improvements of the mail composer, preferences, MIME handling and others, etc.

In addition to the above enhancements, many bugs in earlier versions are now fixed in Pine 4, e.g. in earlier versions, dates in the 21st century would be sorted incorrectly among dates of the current century. The new Pine 4 should be year-2000 compliant (however there is no guarantee as Pine is essentially a freeware).

While this upgrade should be transparent to all Pine users, you may get a message generated by the system with the subject "DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE FOLDER WITH INTERNAL DATA". The reason is apparent from the Pine 4.01 release notes:

Beginning with version 4.00, Pine supports enhanced functionality for sites using the standard Unix mailbox format or the MMDF mailbox format. It does this by creating a "pseudo-message" at the beginning of the folder which holds the following values:

unique identifier validity stamp

last assigned unique identifier

any keyword flags assigned to the mailbox

For complete information on the changes from Pine 3.96 to Pine 4, please refer to the Pine documentation online. There is also an online tutorial for Pine 4 available at the URL: http://www.washington.edu/pine/tutorial.4/index.html

K C Chang
Tel: 2859 7972
E-mail: kcchang@hkusua.hku.hk

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