Alpine is a free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 email client developed at the University of Washington

University of Washington

University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

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Alpine 1.0 was publicly released on December 20, 2007.

The name "Alpine" stands for Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email.

Alpine is a rewrite of the Pine Message System that adds support for Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 and other features. Alpine is meant to be suitable for both inexperienced email users and the most demanding of power user

Power user

A power user is a user of a personal computer who has the ability to use advanced features of programs which are beyond the abilities of "normal" users, but is not necessarily capable of programming and system administration...

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