PINE used to be the best thing in email reading technology. If you’ve used something like pico or nano, you’ve used a similar interface to the email reader that came out of the University of Washington.

I decided that I should start reading the cron job failure mail but I didn’t want to do something fancy that involved fetching the email or redirecting to somewhere I actually read. Instead I’ll read it on the server from the command line.

PINE is still around as Alpine and is available for the major operating systems. I installed it from source without a problem and started it up to get the familiar menu:

Although I haven’t used this in about 15 years, I was navigating with keystrokes without a thought. I think I used this from about 1986 to around the time that GMail came out. Muscle memory dies hard.