Alpine

Qter

Writing an email in Alpine

If you prefer working in a terminal window, then your email client can't get much lighter than Alpine. It's a descendent of the classic Pine email client and lives up to its ancestor's legacy.

Even if you're not a techie, you'll find Alpine easy to set up. You can do the job within the application; no need to edit a configuration file. You write messages in Alpine's version of the Pico text editor, which itself is easy to use.

On top of that, Alpine supports several common email protocols like POP, SMTP, and IMAP. It also lets you send and receive email over a local network. You can't send HTML emails with Alpine, but you can read HTML emails that contain only text.