Re: [Lynx-dev] lynx and webmail interfaces?

[Thorsten Glaser]

Karen Lewellen dixit:

> my current access to both pine and alpine are tied to shellworld entirely, or
> via the dreamhost shell service provided to my office.

OK. If you can use these for eMail, you’ll be good then.

> The question seems to be if it can be configured to access gmail,
> including passing any security related factors?

Googlemail is exceptionally bad at playing well. I have to
use a Googlemail account for work and while I eventually
managed to sending with it with alpine (it needs alpine as
alpine has special code to work with Googlemail), I have
set it up to forward to an IMAP server I run myself, as its
IMAP implementation is so bad it’s not even funny any more.

(In theory you should be able to access Googlemail via IMAP;
in practice, you’ll hate the bugs.)

I can only really really urge you to seek a proper eMail
provider that supports standard SMTP and IMAP.

> if alpine can do this,  can not some of the associated
> tools be incorporated into pine?

Unfortunately, pine is not only “end of life” but also has a
problematic licence, which is the thing that directly led to
alpine (short for “apache-licenced pine”) being a rewrite.

So either you’ve got to use alpine with Googlemail and suffer
from its shortcomings, or you can use either pine or alpine
with good as any standard eMail provider that supports SMTP
and IMAP.

(A very small number of years ago, this would have ended my
message; however, nowadays, there is another problem. If you
use an old version of pine (especially for DOS) it will have
been built with an old SSL library that cannot do TLSv1.2 or
TLSv1.3, and more and more endpoints unfortunately require
that. Running pine/alpine on an up-to-date BSD or GNU/Linux
shellserver would work, or having a kind of “SSL proxy” on a
machine that supports both the old and new protocols (which
is something I set up for myself with a pair of stunnel4
services), or having an SMTP and IMAP server on a box that
supports the old TLSv1.0 protocol and ciphersuites, which
often can be configured even on systems like Debian 11 that
do not accept these out of the box any more.)

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
> emacs als auch vi zum Kotzen finde (joe rules) und pine für den einzig
> bedienbaren textmode-mailclient halte (und ich hab sie alle ausprobiert). ;)
Hallooooo, ich bin der Holger ("Hallo Holger!"), und ich bin ebenfalls
... pine-User, und das auch noch gewohnheitsmäßig ("Oooooooohhh").  [aus dasr]