Configuring pine email on your own computer for Physical Sciences Mail

Configuring pine email on your own computer for Physical Sciences Mail


If you would like to use Pine with secure IMAP for a ps.uci.edu, ess.uci.edu, chem.uci.edu, or math.uci.edu email address directly from your computer instead of through home.ps.uci.edu, download psrootca_pine_support_package.tar.gz and follow the instructions below (now supports BSD too):

$ tar xzfv psrootca_pine_support_package.tar.gz
psrootca_pine_support_package/
psrootca_pine_support_package/install

$ cd psrootca_pine_support_package/

$ su
Password:

Enter your root password…

# ./install

Pine uses normal libssl, looking for ca-bundle.crt...

Detected that libssl certs belong in these location(s):
/usr/share/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt

Insert Physical Sciences Root Certificate? [y/n] y

Installed Physical Sciences Root Certificate to /usr/share/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt

Note: Older libssl libraries seem to use cert.pem instead of ca-bundle.crt and many machines with a pine package built for this are missing the file entirely. This includes Ubuntu machines with the 3rd party .deb pine package. If you have such a machine the output of ./install will look like this:

# ./install

Pine uses libssl.so.0.x, looking for cert.pem...

cert.pem missing, going to create /usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem

Detected that libssl certs belong in these location(s):
/usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem

Insert Physical Sciences Root Certificate? [y/n] y

Installed Physical Sciences Root Certificate to /usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem

If install finds multiple ca-bundle.crt (or cert.pem as applicable) files that may be used by pine it will install to all possible locations to maximize the probability of success. It won’t cause any harm to other applications if it inserts the certificate to a CA store that does not require it, so don’t worry about this.

This will take care of pine’s certificate trust issues but you will still need to copy your .pinerc from your home directory on home.ps.uci.edu to connect to the right server and folders. If you can’t get the PS root certificate to work with your version of pine, you can instruct it not to validate the security certificate by adding /novalidate-cert after /ssl in the folder paths in your .pinerc file.