cone is a console mailclient with an nCurses interface. It looks a lot like Pine but is GPL licensed, comes with integrated GPG support and is better than Pine in various other ways.

Installing is easy. Here is how to do it (using stow to manage the package).

$> wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/courier/cone-0.61.tar.bz2
$> tar -xjvf cone-0.61.tar.bz2
$> cd cone-0.61/
$> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/cone-0.61
$> make
#> make install
#> make install-configure
#> cd /usr/local/stow/
#> stow cone-0.61

The current version is always available for download at http://www.courier-mta.org/?download.php~cone

The configure script doesn't check all requirements correctly. You need to install at least these two libraries:

#> apt-get install libssl-dev libxml2-dev

Cone needs a recent compiler! Compiling with GCC/G++ 2.95 will fail with the following error:

mail.C:301: macro `LIBMAIL_THROW' used without args

And comiling with GCC/G++ 3.0 fails wih this error:

libmail.a(headers.o)(.text+0x22ae): In function `mail::Header::mime::fromString(std::string)':
/root/cone-0.62/libmail/headers.C:157: undefined reference to `mail::Header::Header(mail::Header const&)'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

You need GCC/G++ 3.2 to compile it successful. Giving GCC/G++ 3.2 as environment variable does not work – some parts of the compile process simply ignore it. Instead change the symlinks in /usr/bin:

#> apt-get install gcc-3.2 g++-3.2
#> rm /usr/bin/gcc
#> ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-3.2 /usr/bin/gcc
#> rm /usr/bin/g++
#> ln -s /usr/bin/g++-3.2 /usr/bin/g++

A correct locale needs to be set to run cone. If this is not already done try this:

#> dpkg-reconfigure locales