Anne

It can be done, my mac has OSX 10.9.5 and it has xcode installed and I use iterm.
This is what I remember of the process, hopefully this information is mostly accurate.

I went to the Alpine website: http://www.washington.edu/alpine/acquire/
and got alpine/alpine.tar.Z
Alpine 2.00

In that folder under doc, under tech-notes, I found a file installation memo.
in terminal at the command line, I moved to the folder directory and I typed
./configure and then make. And I got a fatal error

I found an email on the “alpine-info” iist with my error
fatal error: ‘pam/pam_appl.h’ file not found
and a suggestion
Edit the file imap/Makefile and look for the line the starts with oxp:
delete the part that says -DMAC_OSX_KLUDGE=1, so leave the line as
EXTRACFLAGS=”$(EXTRACFLAGS)” \

Thad fixed my problem. I ran make and it gave a lot of warnings but no fatal error.

I found a note that instead of copying the binaries manually, you may use
make install
to install them. that worked. Awesome.

then I followed this thread:

In the end, alpine was just easier

Start Alpine, and go to the configurations page with M-S-C. Page down until you see “Enable Incoming Folders Collection.” Press return to select it, then E to exit and Q to quit. Restart alpine.

Press L for the folder list. Highlight “Incoming-Folders” and press return. Press A for a new folder.

When asked for the name of the server to contain the added folder, enter this for a GMail account.
imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=ACCOUNT_NAME@gmail.com

At the “Folder on ‘imap.gmail.com/ssl/use…’ to add:” prompt, enter “Inbox”.

For the “Nickname for folder ‘Inbox’:”, enter whatever you want to call the folder locally. I called mine ACCOUNT_NAME@gmail.com

When you press return you’ll be prompted for your password, or given an warning screen about certificates and asked for permission to continue. Enter yes, or your password or both, as needed.

But then following other recommendations, I edited my alpine config as follow
user domain:
smtp server: “smtp.gmail.com/user=username@gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert”
Inbox path: “pop.gmail.com/POP3/SSL/novalidate-cert/user=username@gmail.com”

I modified read message folder so Alpine would save the emails when I had read them – otherwise they disappeared from my Alpine inbox.

enable incoming folders collection is set
I changed customized header
and I selected don’t rename don’t delete so Alpine would not ask me to move my messages to a folder every month.

at the terminal I ran touch so Alpine would remember Password
Now if you want that your password should be saved on your computer (dont worry its totally safe) , then open the terminal and if you are in your home directory then give the following command

touch .pine-passfile

When I tried to read email from gmail the connection failed. It turns out that gmail default setting would not allow for Alpine to read the email, and there was a message with instructions on how to change this security setting.
After that I was able to read emails from Alpine and save them on my mac.

I think there is a setting that deletes email from gmail as Alpine accesses them. I have not set it to that yet.

That’s about it I think. I hope this may help someone else, or at least give a sense of what is involved.

The one problem is that emails disappeared from the inbox if I did not save them before going to another box, sentbox etc. But since all the emails stayed on the gmail server and could be accessed there, they are not completely lost.

The other option is to use imap

{imap.gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=username@gmail.com}Inbox

What happens then is that gmail and the local inbox look exactly the same, same read or unread messages. But when I go to save I get a message has shrunk on every file.