Reading Lotus Notes Mail using Alpine

To use alpine to read your Lotus Notes mail, perform the following steps. In these examples, your Lotus Notes user name is taken to be joeuser. You should make the appropriate changes in all the examples, to substitute your actual user name in each place. Also, the mail server is given as mail-j.fordham.edu. You should substitute the first letter of your Lotus Notes user name in place of j.

1. Forward your Unix mail to your account on fordham.edu. This is done by creating a file, named .forward (notice the initial dot), in your home directory. This file should contain a single line, saying
   joeuser@smtp.fordham.edu

2. Configure alpine to move your mail after reading it into a folder named read-messages. This is done as follows:
   1. Start alpine and select SETUP by hitting the S key.

   2. Press the C key to select Config.

   3. Use the down arrow or N key to select read-message-folder and press the C key for Change Value. Give read-message-folder the new value of
      read-messages

   4. Press the E key to exit Config. Answer Y when asked whether to commit the changes.

   If you have existing mail in your Unix inbox, you should read it now before continuing with the next step. After reading it, exit alpine so that the contents of the inbox will be moved into your read-messages folder. After the next step, your Unix inbox will become inaccessible to alpine.

3. Configure alpine to fetch your mail using the POP-3 protocol from the Lotus Notes mail server.
   1. Again in alpine go into SETUP and select Config.

   2. Use the down arrow or N key to select inbox-path and press the C key for Change Value. Give inbox-path the new value of
      {mail-j.fordham.edu/pop3/user=joeuser}INBOX

   3. Press the E key to exit Config. Answer Y when asked whether to commit the changes.

Now each time you start alpine, it will prompt you for your password on the Lotus Notes server. Then it will fetch the mail from the server so you can read it. When you exit alpine, it will ask you to confirm whether to move the read messages into your read-messages folder and whether to expunge them from the server. You should normally answer Yes to both questions. The next time you run alpine, the mail you have previously read (including any mail previously in the inbox on erdos) will be available by using L for Folder List from the main menu, then selecting the read-messages folder.

More information can be found on the World-Wide Web at the URL:

http://www.washington.edu/alpine