compiling pine in Mac OS X

compiling pine in Mac OS X

Compiling Pine and Making Sendmail Work... Fun For The Whole Family!

(revision 5)

Be aware that these instructions assume some familiarity with unix. Newbies have used these successfully, but if in doubt, proceed with caution.

Be aware that getting pine to read local mail is a non-trivial exercise, because you need to get mail from your POP account to your local machine. Getting pine to speak to your IMAP account (such as your mac.com email) is even more non-trivial.

However, getting just pine working to send email is fairly straightforward, and a good exercise in learning a bit about working in the BSD Unix layer of Mac OS X. Good luck and have fun!

Instructions

First, you must have installed the developer tools. If you haven't yet, get out your "Developer Tools" CD and install them.
I downloaded the latest Pine source from uwash:
<ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine.tar.Z>
I used Omniweb (what a great browser!) but you can also use wget at the command line:

wget ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine.tar.Z
and then...

tar xvfz pine.tar.Z
cd pine4.33
./build osx

...wait a couple minutes for it to compile (here's where a fast drive and processor help)...

cd bin
sudo cp * /usr/local/bin/

Which gets pine going!
Yay! But wait! Why can't we send mail? Ahhh, pine is stupid AND sendmail is misconfigured by default. Okay, let's fix these:

sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/sendmail /usr/lib/sendmail

This puts a symlink of sendmail where Pine thinks it should be. Now enable sendmail the clean way. (I have removed the "dirty" instructions. The following are from the Mac OS X for Users list and Matthew Butch's excellent system reports HOWTO.)

sudo chmod g-w /

(This removes group write permission from the root of the file system. Group write on root is considered insecure and sendmail rightly refuses to execute in this vulnerable state.)
Okay, Pine sends email now!
Yay! But wait! Why do some servers reject our email? Ahhh, they're aggressively anti-spam and I'm trying to email from localhost.mydomain.com, which is behind a firewall, not accessible from the general internet, and thus looks EXACTLY like a spam server! Okay, let's tell the world we're emailing from a valid domain.

First, be sure you've run pine at least once. So let's start pine:

pine

You'll see a help screen the first time you run it. More importantly, Pine will generate a .pinerc config file with default values and lots of good comments. Now QUIT out of pine so we can edit this file.
pico -w .pinerc

find these lines:
# Sets domain part of From: and local addresses in outgoing mail. user-domain=
and set user-domain to your actual email domain... mac.com might work, but I don't promise anything. :-)
Alternately, set this using pine's Setup menus. It's easier.

Okay, Pine sends email, doesn't look like a spammer, and it gets through. Yay! Wasn't that fun? ;-)

An Aside: IMAP

Speaking of IMAP, someone on the Mac OS X Unix list asked how to set up a local IMAP server.

Answer: Download the IMAP source. (I like uwash, they make a very fast imap server.) Compile. Install. Configure.

This is a non-trivial exercise in the BSD layer of Mac OS X. If you're not familiar with this sort of thing, proceed with caution. I haven't done this on Mac OS X yet. However, Matthew Butch has. See his excellent getting daily system reports in Mail.app HOWTO, which includes notes on compiling, installing and configuring the UWash IMAP server.