Article 159787 of comp.os.vms: 22-NOV-1996 PINE 3.91 beta 10 A new beta of PINE for VMS is available (PINE 3.91 BETA 10) which contains a number of new things and changes to improve stability/reduce bugs. Details are enclosed below for those interested. Regards, Andy Harper Kings College London What is PINE ? -------------- Pine is a program that runs on a number of different platforms to provide a screen based mail and news reading facility. It originates at the University of Washington. Mail folders on remote systems can be read as easily as local mail folders, using standard POP and IMAP protocols. What is IMAP ? -------------- Several people asked 'what is IMAP' after my earlier message went around. Well it's a protocol that allows a client to access mailboxes on a server. It differs from the POP protocol in a number of key areas: * POP only accesses the NEWMAIL folder; IMAP can access any folder * POP downloads messages to the client; IMAP keeps them on the server (in either case, messages can be downloaded or left on the server if you wish but access to such messages with POP becomes tricky). POP is not good for people who move from PC to PC, whereas IMAP handles this neatly. * POP can only read a mailbox and delete items from it; IMAP can additionally search, rename and store (though these are not implemented in this VMS port). This allows suitable clients to move messages between folders on different systems. What Mail clients use IMAP? --------------------------- Most of the clients around still use POP (Eudora, pegasus, netscape mail etc.) but a number are starting to incorporate IMAP access to. The commercial one we use is called Simeon by ESYS Corporation (this is not a recommendation and I have no connection with the company!) and there is a freeware one called ATISMAIL around. There's also talk of adding IMAP to NETSCAPE mail and perhaps EUDORA. It IS an internet 'standard' and is therefore likely to become more prevalent over time. What about this IMAP server? ---------------------------- We had a need for a functional IMAP server on our VMS systems, and a number of others seemed to be interested too, so I set about finding one. One such is the IMAPD server included with the PINE software from Univ. of Washington, which was ported to VMS by Yehavi Bourvine (based on the one included in the PINE 3.91 kit from U of Washington). This was known as 3.91 beta 5 for VMS. I've updated Yehavi's port with some additional bug fixes and features. Although there are later releases of pine (3.95 is current I believe) there are no working VMS ports (though 3.95 does include a partial port which is grossly incomplete). My improvements to 3.91 are primarily: * Fixing some problems with PINE sending mail out * Completing the port of the IMAPD server * Fully supporting the NETLIB TCP/IP interface * Adding a few new features, such as logging and decnet address mapping * Supporting builds with DEC C 5.3, GNU C 2.7.1 and VAXC 3.2, on both VAX and ALPHA RESTRICTIONS: ------------ The VMS port cannot current handle any operation which requires creating an empty mailbox or transferring a message from the network into a vms folder. This is due to major restrictions in the VMS callable mail interface. Several discussions with Digital have resulted in no viable workarounds as yet. I hesitate to say that I had some difficulty convincing them of the need for this but I did! AVAILABILITY: ------------- FTP: ftp://ftp2.kcl.ac.uk/zip/pine_3_91_beta_10.zip (ZIP format) ---- See the .ANN files for further information & build instructions.