the default /etc/pine.conf as of 6.2 is... silly for lack of a better word. By setting default colors, you override a person's preference to what colors their terminals are, which is not expected behavior at all. Having pine pop up with a black background in a transparent terminal is... different. The removal of the lower color sections makes it play nicer; not removing the color-style causes a nice cyan background. Attaching a patch for the pine.conf to make it play nicer
Created attachment 163 [details] get rid of nasty colors
This isn't a bug - note that the colors are not set in /etc/pine.conf.fixed, so you should be able to set your own colors.
I agree that it was wrong to put these defaults in the /etc/pine.conf. Because of this, upgrading to RH 6.2 messes with people's color setting - not nice. Additionally, even with normal-foreground-color=black normal-background-color=white in ~/.pinerc I still do not get white background! In kvt and xterm I get grey background and in rxvt I get some reddish yellow. And even worse, there does not seem to be a way to access those settings from pine configuration menu and it is not clear where I am supposed to look for additional documentation on them in order to be able to "fight" them.
i, too, would like to emphasize that the redhat 6.2 pine default of having colours enabled is broken. i take issues with some of the other default settings as well -- pine is intended to be a simple mail reader for novice users to start with. they're able to turn on all those features themselves as, or IF they learn what they mean. my machine is primarily novice users. and also primarily users on windows or macs whose terminal programs defaults are *incompatible* with the default colour scheme you've selected. please restore the pine distribution defaults. thanks -dean