UW Email
This article can also be named “Emailing at the University of Washington”.
Alpine is an email client, whose predecessor is Pine. Both were initially developed by the University of Washington since 1992 (for Pine) and 2007 (for Alpine). The university stopped developing the software in August 2008 1. The continuation of the development was picked up by Eduardo Chappa who previously made patches for Pine and Alpine. Newer alpine versions would be hosted on Chappa’s UW student and staff page until 2006 and 2010 2 when his affiliations with UW ended. Alpine is subsequently hosted privately on 000webhost then finally only the git repository 3.
Alpine was used at the UW along with Deskmail, which used the IMAP and SMTP protocol to send and receive emails. Alpine was available with shell access for faculty and staff. Additionally, LDAP was also configured with Alpine on the server, so it’s possible to look up people in the directory directly from the email client; this is not possible with the current Google/Outlook infrastructure. Deskmail, Alpine, Pine were discontinued at the university on December 2018 as part of the email modernization program 4.
IMAP
The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) protocol was used by clients to retrieve email from the server through TCP/IP. It was designed by Mark Crispin at Stanford in 1985. Development on the first server implementation, UW IMAP, was done when Crispin worked at the UW from 1988 to 2008.
The layoff 56 in 2008 is the reason behind the discontinued development for Alpine and IMAP from the University.
Me & Alpine
When I was working at Parrington Hall, I realized that I’m staff and therefore had the privilege to use Alpine and Homer (staff web publishing). I tried out both Alpine from the command-line and Web Alpine, both were were really light-weight and I didn’t have to store emails on my phone as I could remote into the server. Of course, this means I can’t browser emails offline (unless I have a desktop version of Alpine), and I soon reverted to Google Inbox after.
Interwebz and Further Readings
Note: If pages don’t work, there’s a good chance it’s available on archive.org or archive.is.
(Al)pine
- Current Alpine Git Repository
- My Alpine Clone as of 2018
- Alpine Mailing List
- UW Pine Webpage
- UW Alpine Webpage
- Wikipedia article on Pine
- Wikipedia article on Alpine
- Wikipedia article on UW IMAP
- Chappa’s Alpine page on UW staff
- Chappa’s Alpine page on 000webhost
IMAP & Related People
- UW IMAP Webpage
- Wikipedia on UW IMAP
- Panda IMAP Copy on GitHub
- Mark Crispin on UW staff
- Terry Gray on UW staff did some analysis on IMAP vs. POP.
- Corey Satten and
- Josh Larios among the other 64 employees were also laid off in 2008.