Ok, it always runs the rsh-command, but if it outputs anything to stderr, even a minor warning, it seems that alpine then gives up on it and falls back to imap.
In my case, /usr/lib/dovecot/imap was displaying this, but otherwise working: imap(<user>,)Error: net_connect_unix(/var/run/dovecot/stats-writer) failed: Permission denied What worked for me: root@kite:~>cat /usr/local/bin/imap-for-alpine #!/bin/sh exec /usr/lib/dovecot/imap 2>/dev/null root@kite:~>cat /etc/pine.conf inbox-path={localhost}inbox rsh-command=/usr/local/bin/imap-for-alpine -- see shy jo
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