For those who prefer to access email via the command line, Pine is installed on the birdhouse mail server. Pine can be configured to access Birdhouse email addresses by configuring it to use IMAP. You’ll need to be comfortable editing files from the command-line to make this work. Pine is not an officially supported mail client at Birdhouse — you’re on your own (though we would be curious to hear your success/failure stories with it).

Pine IMAP configuration instructions:

1. Launch Pine and accept any “certificate” messages you receive.
2. Type S (for setup) then L (for Collection Lists)
3. Type A (to add collection).
4. In the nickname field, type something memorable, such as “Birdhouse IMAP”
5. In the Server field, type:
   birdhouse.org/user=yourname
   (replacing “birdhouse.org” with your domain name and “yourname” with your birdhouse login name)
6. To save your settings and exit this screen, type ^X.
7. For more details, follow these instructions

You will now be able to check your mail with pine. To make the certificate warnings disappear permanently, open the .pinerc file in your home directory and add /novalidate-cert to the end of the line. So your smtp server line may now look something like this:

smtp-server=mydomain.com/user=joebob/novalidate-cert

Now search the file for “localhost” and add the same string, so that it now reads:

inbox-path={localhost/novalidate-cert}inbox

Together, these changes will both engage SMTP-Auth (which is enforced by birdhouse) and will permanently disable the cert warnings.

You will need to authenticate to the server the first time you check your mail and the first time you send mail, per pine session. You should now be able to use pine normally.

Contact us for a working .pinerc file to use as a template.

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