Despite my increasing like of Apple's Mail, I've gone "back to the future" and started using PINE. (I was always an ELM user, but PINE has much better features.) These are some notes.

Using mac.com email addresses

Mac.com is an IMAP mail service. Since I am using it, that's what I cover, for the most part. I'll hit up the POP mailboxes later.

Setting up IMAP is pretty easy, but not well documented. First, just register with iTools and get a mailbox. Then, quit Mail, and fire up PINE.

Press S to enter the setup. Press C to enter the configs. Scroll down to inbox-path (around the 5th setting) Press return and type in:

{mail.mac.com/user=wildgift}INBOX

Substitute your email name for wildgift.

You should also set up the smtp-server, personal-name, and user-domain. These will allow you to send mail.

Press e to exit this setting. Press y to confirm. Then press q to quit (and y to confirm).

Restart PINE, and you'll be asked for a password. You'll get logged in, and can access your inbox.

Symlink your existing email boxes

You'll want to symlink in some of your existing folders. To get at the emails, you symlink to the files named ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/(*).mbox/mbox

The links will go into ~/mail/ and will show up in PINE.

What I did was create this script to do the linking:
#! /bin/sh
# file name is makelink
BOX=$1
ln -s ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/${BOX}.mbox/mbox ${BOX}

You use it like this:
sh makelink personal

That links the mailbox personal into PINE.

You can deal with mailboxes in folders by doing an mkdir foldername and then sh makelink foldername/mailbox.

Once this is done, you need to fire up Mail, and then go into each of the linked mailboxes. Mail will begin indexing the emails, and you'll have to wait until they're all indexed (click on the spinner for a progress window). Indexing causes the emails to be copied into the mbox files from a holding mailbox named Incoming_Messages.

Also, while you have Mail open, disable the mac.com account. That way, if you start up Mail, you won't accidentally download (and filter) the mail.

Once done, you should avoid starting up Mail, especially when PINE is running.

More Pine Notes

It's a pain to use folders in PINE, so you end up deleting more and saving into archives. This is totally okay, because you'll tend to file messages immediate rather than allowing them to collect in the INBOX. (I hope!)

You have to type the mailbox names, so it's a good idea to rename hard-to-type file names.

I run PINE from a script that also performs a backup of all the altered folders in Library/Mail/Mailboxes. This is pretty paranoid, but, I'm afraid of losing mail switching between PINE and Mail.

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/pine
cd ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes
find . -name mbox -newer /tmp/pinetimer -exec zip -u \
~/backups/mboxes-`date +%h-%m-%H-%M`.zip {} \;

There are a few things to note here, for script writing newbies.

Line 1 - tells the OS that this text file is to be run through /bin/sh, the command shell scripting language. Line 2 - when you run pine, you want to run a specific copy of pine - /usr/bin/pine. If you don't do this, and you name this script 'pine', you could end up running the script itself (over and over!) Line 3 - you need to cd for the next command. Line 4 - the find command examines a file system. Do a "man find" for more info. The -exec parameter runs a command on found files.

Umm - why did I switch? It's an experiment to see if I'll write shorter emails (and spend less time writing them).