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The site http://read.gwene.org/ converts rss feeds to nntp. So one can read rss feeds as a public Usenet news group. The conversion is already available for MathOverflow, see http://read.gwene.org/group/gwene.mathoverflow.recent

My question is that how can one configure the Pine/Alpine email client in order to read the title of MathOverflow recent questions using the service provided by the above site?

Sorry if my question is off topic here. It is not unreasonable to think that there are some people on MO who use nntp to read questions (as the existence of the above link suggests). I ask this question to get help since I couldn't get help elsewhere. I asked this question on superuser 7 months ago without receiving answer. I thought there are some techy users here who can help. (I know it is possible to directly read rss feeds in some email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird, I am just interested to read using nntp as I use the text based client Pine/Alpine).

Thank you.

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    $\begingroup$ +1 for the obsolete technology nostalgia. $\endgroup$
    – Kim Morrison Mod
    Commented Feb 18, 2014 at 21:35
  • $\begingroup$ Googling suggests that Alpine does support the NNTP protocol, which for guest access should be as simple as setting nntp-server = news.gwene.org in the appropriate config file. But I don't use Alpine, so I am not sure. (Alternatively, SLRN is a text-based news reader that is very simple to configure.) In general I think you'd get better responses if you include some more info (what have you tried, what are the errors, etc.) $\endgroup$
    – Willie Wong
    Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 8:35

2 Answers 2

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  1. Launch pine/alpine

  2. type "S" to enter (S)etup.

  3. type "C" to enter (C)onfig.

  4. arrow down to "NNTP Server (for news)", hit enter, type "news.gwene.org" or "news.gmane.org" and hit enter.

  5. Hit "E" to (E)xit setup.

  6. Hit "y" to save.

  7. Press "L" for Folder List.

  8. Arrow down to News and hit enter.

  9. Press "A" to add a newsgroup.

  10. Enter "gwene.mathoverflow.recent" or press ctrl-T for a list...

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Hi, it the step 8, I cannot find "News" $\endgroup$
    – Name
    Commented Apr 18, 2017 at 13:20
  • $\begingroup$ @Name try to quit pine and open it again. it should appear then. if that does not help open pine, press s, then c, then scroll down to: "Enable Incoming Folders Collection" and enable this by pressing X. $\endgroup$
    – Loreno Heer
    Commented Apr 18, 2017 at 13:30
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    $\begingroup$ Ok, after exiting from pine/alpine in the collection folders, I saw something like News-Collection <News on news.gwene.org/nntp>, I pressed A and added the value gwene.mathoverflow.recent and it worked! Great. $\endgroup$
    – Name
    Commented Apr 18, 2017 at 13:40
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This is not something that we could easily (officially) support, as the use case here would be quite limited. However, as a self-respecting SysOp of a multi-line 80's BBS - I can't help but be intrigued here.

Believe it or not, we get some support emails from people still using PINE. Heck, I used it as recently as a few years ago. I don't believe there's any easy way of having it support RSS, but a proxy could be used.

Fortunately, most IMAP bindings bundled in the standard or extended libraries of popular languages can consume and also produce the appropriate NNTP feed. What's left is simply consuming RSS, putting it in a database, then producing a news feed.

If it sounds like I'm volunteering to do this, I kind of am, but I don't have a lot of bandwidth for side projects. If someone wants to pick it up, I'm happy to throw some server space at it.

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  • $\begingroup$ I still use pine! I only switched from linux to a mac when I learned that I could continue to do almost everything from a terminal window... $\endgroup$
    – Andy Putman
    Commented Mar 4, 2014 at 16:24

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