Saving drafts in Pine

January 7, 2020 5:24 PM

Follow-up to a previous question: Did the 1995 version of Pine allow users to save drafts of unsent emails?
posted by pxe2000 to Technology (10 answers total)

Best answer: Yup. I still use it on an old shell account.
posted by Melismata at 6:15 PM on January 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Which version do you use, Melismata?
posted by pxe2000 at 6:23 PM on January 7, 2020

Best answer: I used pine for more than a decade starting around '93, and yes, this functionality was available, even in earlier versions of pine I would sometimes run into on various servers. The terminology was a little different, though: What you would do is hit Ctrl-O to "Postpone" the message you were crafting. When you wanted to resume working on it later, you'd go find it in a special folder called "postponed-msgs". (Pine was uncommonly good software. Once you knew the keystrokes, you could absolutely fly.)
posted by /\/\/\/ at 6:38 PM on January 7, 2020 [14 favorites]

I started college on Pine in 1995 and don't remember saving drafts ever being a new feature, so I'm guessing it was there all along. Oh yeah, postponed, exactly!
posted by slidell at 7:08 PM on January 7, 2020

Best answer: I am pretty sure yes, as I recall doing this in 1988 when I only had a few minutes in the computer lab at a time.
posted by Riverine at 8:43 PM on January 7, 2020

Best answer: Yes, as/VVV says, in 'postponed' form but if IIRC, it did not automatically save a draft, so it was still possible to lose what you'd composed if you forgot, or the system crashed, etc.

I miss pine. Especially for contacts management, in particular shortcuts.
posted by Dashy at 10:12 PM on January 7, 2020

Best answer: Somewhat relatedly, there was (is) also a dead.letter file for the last abandoned message (i.e. the last thing you started writing and then cancelled). By default there's one but I think there's some setting to allow for the accumulation of more. As an indecisive writer, I've used this to recover drafts with some frequency.

This is currently true in Alpine (confirmed via my current dead.letter file), but it was there in Pine too. I switched to Pine somewhere around 2001-2 (!) and don't recall it being a new feature that showed up after that, so I suspect it was there earlier as well.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 11:08 PM on January 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

About page:

GENERAL INFORMATION ON THE ALPINE MESSAGE SYSTEM

Version 2.20
(built Fri Jul 7 23:33:35 UTC 2017)

Copyright 2013-2015 Eduardo Chappa,
Copyright 2006-2008 University of Washington.
posted by Melismata at 7:35 AM on January 8, 2020

I started using Pine in fall 1996 and I am pretty sure that was a feature even then, because I do remember them adding other features like IMAP support, but I feel like ^O was already there.
posted by wnissen at 1:24 PM on January 8, 2020

Best answer: Pine 3.90 introduced "Postpone multiple messages" according to the changelog, and that release is dated Aug 24, 1994, based on WCityMike's link. So the ability to postpone a single message logically should have existed before 1994, and postponing multiple messages was in place in 1995 if your system was running a recent enough version.
posted by zachlipton at 1:40 PM on January 8, 2020 [2 favorites]