Changing Pine "From" Address

By default, Pine will use the userid and hostname for the system you are on as the default "from" address, so if your userid is jsmith and you are logged into somewhere.com, your "from" address in the messages you send with Pine will be jsmith@somewhere.com. If you wish to change the "from" address, you will need to edit your .pinerc file (pinerc on Windows systems), which should be in your login directory (ls -al .pinerc will show the file on a Unix or Linux system).

If you are using Pine 4.0 or later (when you first start Pine, you will see the version number at the top of the Pine screen), you can gain the capability to change the "from" address by adding allow-changing-from to your feature-list and modifying the customized-hdrs line in your Pine configuration file. The option to modify the allow-changing-from setting isn't available through the configuration screens within Pine, you have to edit your pinerc file, which defaults to .pinerc on Unix and Linux systems and pinerc in PC-Pine for Windows systems. But, if you are using Pine 4.30 or later, you don't even have to add this line, since, starting with Pine 4.30, the allow-changing-from option defaults to on, unless your system administrator has configured it to default to off.

As as example, here is the feature list section from a .pinerc file prior to the change:

# List of features; see Pine's Setup/options menu for the current set. # e.g. feature-list= select-without-confirm, signature-at-bottom # Default condition for all of the features is no-. feature-list=enable-full-header-cmd

To enable modification of the "from" address, add a comma to the end of the last option listed, i.e. "feature-list=enable-full-header-cmd" in this case and put "allow-changing-from" on the line beneath it. There must be a comma between features in your feature-list and there cannot be any blank lines. The section above would now appear as shown below:

Again, the above step shouldn't be needed, if you are using Pine 4.30 or later. But you need to modify the customized-hdrs line in the .pinerc file, whether you are using a version prior to 4.30 or after 4.30. As an example, the line in a .pinerc file is shown below prior to making the needed change:

# Add these customized headers (and possible default values) when composing customized-hdrs=

Modify the line to include what you want to appear as the default "from" address. Let's suppose my name is John Smith and my address is John.M.Smith@overtherainbow.com. I could make the change to customized-hdrs as shown below:

# Add these customized headers (and possible default values) when composing
customized-hdrs=From: John Smith <John.M.Smith@overtherainbow.com>

When you start Pine and compose a new message now, you will still see the header lines you saw before when you composed a new message, i.e. as shown below:


To      :
Cc      :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----

But, if you hit the Ctrl and R keys simultaneously to display "Rich Headers", you will now see the following:


From    : John Smith <John.M.Smith@overtherainbow.com>
To      :
Cc      :
Bcc     :
Newsgrps:
Fcc     : sent-mail
Lcc     :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----

The "from" address you see above would be the default "from" address whenever you send a message. You don't need to hit Ctrl-R to display it, unless you want to modify it. By hitting Ctrl-R you can change the "from" address from its new default value to anything you wish.

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Created: March 31, 2005