Pine is the University of Washington's Program for Internet News and Email. In 2006, UW ceased development on Pine and started development on a successor christened with the name of Alpine -- in reality, Alpine being Pine v5.0 but now under an Apache license.

There are both Unix and Windows versions of Alpine. The Unix version is text user interface based -- its message editor inspired the text editor Pico. The Windows (and formerly DOS) version is called PC-Alpine.

The Unix version runs very well on the Nokia Internet Tablet N800. With mouse-support enabled it can be be driven very nicely by point-and-click. With support from UW Alpine Development team, the current Alpine source now compiles cleanly on Scratchbox. A binary-only distribution can be downloaded from here.

http://home.mminternet.com/~delaroca/

If you are handy with an xterm, then configuring Alpine on the N800 is relatively straighforward. In return for the effort, one is rewarded with a no-nonsense E-mail client, fast, rich in features and fully standards compliant... Mark Crispin who invented IMAP twenty years ago is part of the UW Alpine Development team and is now running Alpine on his very own N800!

The current Alpine release, v0.99999, is a pre-release... but don't worry, as pre-releases go this is quite solid and many people use and depend on it for their daily E-mail processing. It shouldn't be long before the public v1.0 release. With the new Apache license, the open source community is welcome to get involved. For now, and if interested, please join the Alpine Discussion list, details here:

http://www.washington.edu/alpine

The Usenet News group comp.mail.pine features coverage of Pine / Alpine issues as well. Alpine, by the way is also a capable Usenet News Reader.

Enjoy,

-- Denis

P.S. I have been able to confirm that these Alpine binaries run ok on the n770 with IT OS 2006.