hi guys, thanks for the kick-ass explanation, really appreciate it: ok....I'm doing today a loot of things at the same time, my hard drive is making my problems too, so I decided to make a full backup (18 GB) to a External Firewire hard drive. Anyway... as I see the first and main issue is to make pine run on OS X, that will need a bit of investigation in internet. (never played with the Unix site of OS X) Then I'll follow your instructions: yes, I like Mail.app too, but as I said it lacks of important features, but never the less is also my main client. I don't use OE anymore. I'll take a look a google so what I find about pine installation in OS X... come back to you :-)