# Pine email client

5 Hacker News commenters recommended Pine email client and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Pine as a lightweight terminal email client that was common on university systems and makes bulk mail cleanup quick.

## Why people recommend it

- Long-standing university email tool (1 comments): "Nearly every university Sun box in the 90s had Pine installed for reading email." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294398))
- Lightweight compared with bloated clients (1 comments): "Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49788843))
- Fast bulk deletion of mail (1 comments): "I logged into the UNIX cluster, opened Pine, and deleted all the crap, page by page." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619283))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Mutt email client](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mutt.md): 26 recommend
- [aerc email client](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aerc.md): 9 recommend
- [NeoMutt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neomutt.md): 8 recommend
- [Alpine email client](https://hackerapproved.com/p/alpine-email-client.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Pine email client", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pine/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).