Though originally designed for inexperienced email users, Alpine
supports many advanced features, and an ever-growing number of
configuration and personal-preference options.

Alpine (formerly Pine) features improved support for UTF-8 and the code
is licensed under the Apache License.

Despite many improvements "under the hood" (the bugs which were
introduced by them were ironed out during more than a full year of
public beta testing), the user interface stays the same, so pine users
can switch painlessly to alpine and notice no change at all.

It uses the same configuration files as pine, so it's a clean update.

The biggest user-visible change are the new animations which are shown
when operations take a long time.