Tuesday 17 September 2013

Using Alpine with outlook.com

On Friday I wrote that you could now use imap with Microsoft's Outlook.com mail service.

I also wrote that I'd had problems getting it to work with evolution on a virtual box vm running crunchbang. I still don't know why it didn't work but I'm happy to report that Alpine - the newer updated replacement for Pine - works just fine on the same vm.

Pine is a mail program with a heritage going back to the early nineties and was one of the first mailers to use imap.

It was extensively used on multi user unix systems, and when I was managing York's early nineties managed pc desktop service we used pc-pine as a pc mail client due to licensing and performance problems with the other windows imap clients available at the time. (This wasn't such a problem as it might be, existing Unix pine users made the shift pretty seamlessly, we could reuse the training materials and documentation from the Unix version, and I wrote a program (in Turbo Pascal no less) to automatically populate a user's confirguration file the first time they ran the application.)

I of course havn't used Pine seriously for years, and had never used Alpine in production, so I used Sanjeeva Wijeyesakere's post on setting up Alpine with gmail as a starting point. Basically if you follow his advice but set the inbox path to

{imap-mail.outlook.com/ssl/user=myusername@outlook.com}inbox

and the smtp server to

smtp-server=smtp-mail.outlook.com/tls/user=myusername@outlook.com

as well as setting the domain name

user-domain=outlook.com

and the personal name

personal-name=myusername

it all worked. Obviously you replace myusername with your account name. Being old school I edited the .pinerc file directly with nano rather than using the Alpine configuration menu. You could of course use gedit, vi, or any other text editor.
Written with StackEdit.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

hey thanks dgm, this post helped me setup alpine on my old system.

Amar Vyas said...

This post was helpful, I was looking for a low-resource (and bandwidth) email client, and recalled (al)pine from my grad school days...the setup was easy, and I am able to send and receive emails@ Yay.

A quick update: the following smtp settings worked for me:

smtp-server=smtp-mail.outlook.com:587/tls/user=username