Pine has an easy to use interface. Below is a screen capture of the main menu.
As you can see, the menu items explain themselves. In pine there is always the top bar which displays information about the current folder (ie INBOX 84 Messages) and a status bar at the bottom. In the image above, the status bar is blank; if Pine wanted to give you information about something it would display it in the blank line between the Copyright and the command list (Help etc.).
In Pine, composing messages could not be easier. You simply press C (or use the arrows to move the menu selector bar to Compose and press enter). The message composition screen displays as seen below:
Simply fill in the fields and type your message. When you are ready to send the message, use Ctrl-X. Refer to the command list on the bottom of the screen for additional options. Pine also has an address book; use Ctrl-T to access the address book and select recipients from within the message composition window.
From the main menu, press I or select Message Index to see a listing of messages in the current folder. The Message Index for INBOX is displayed below:
To the left of each message Pine will display a single letter flag. The last message in the image above has a D flag. This means the message is marked for deletion. Another common flag is A, which means that you have sent a reply (Answer) to the message. Simply press enter to display a message. Also notice the additional command on the bottom of the screen.
Once you are reading a message, you can do several things such as prYnt, Reply, Delete, Forward etc. from the choices at the bottom of the screen:
Notice in the screenshot above, the status line is notifying you that new mail has arrived. This depicts another useful feature of Pine - the status line will give you important messages regarding your e-mail.