Alpine shares many common features of console applications, like a rich set of shortcut keys, using a keyboard instead of a mouse for all navigation and operations.

Alpine supports IMAP, POP, SMTP, NNTP and LDAP protocols natively.

Alpine includes its own editor Pico (Pico stands for PIne COmposer), which includes commands for basic editing of files, such as, search and replace, spelling, and justifying of text, besides cut and paste, and intuitive navigation commands.

Besides being able to set up an alternative editor, users can configure more than a hundred variables and options to their liking, including setting up configuration for sending and receiving e-mail from different services, through an Incoming Folders collection and the use of personalities (called roles in Alpine), and therefore a user can share the same address book between different accounts.

Alpine can also sort individual folders by several criteria, including threading, original sender, recipient, and size.

The configuration and address books can be saved locally or on a remote IMAP server where they are accessible from different computers.

[6] Since January 2013, Eduardo Chappa, an active software developer formerly from the University of Washington, has released newer versions of Alpine from his site.

[19] "Alpine" officially stands for Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email.