Alpine Release Highlights
Alpine Release Highlights
This is the first release to the general public of the Web Alpine IMAP client. It's built on the Alpine Mail System which itself is derived from the Pine Mail System. Externally, besides numerous new features, the most significant change is likely the new licensing. The Alpine Mail System has been release under the Apache 2.0 license.
Internally, there are significant changes. The code has been restructured to partition mail data access routines from those functions that provide the user interface. This allows development on the mail engine proper to be easily reflected across the supported interfaces. Similarly, each interface, Unix, Windows, and Web, can be developed reasponably independently.
Similarly, significant work has been done to make Alpine more international. Internally, message text and so forth is represented in Unicode, and the groundwork has been laid to support status and command translations.
As for the Web Alpine IMAP client, it is an updated, evolutionary improvement upon the Pine-based version that has been serving tens of thousands of users daily on the University of Washington campus for several years. It is not quite as fully featured as the other Alpine mail tools, but is a reasonably solid and complete IMAP client. We also tend to agree with many of its critics that it is a somewhat homely interface, and we are taking significant steps toward addressing that criticism. Stay tuned!