In all versions of pine up to and including version 4.43, the default /etc/pine.conf has # Controls display of color color-style=use-termdef which makes it ignore configured terminal color schemes in KDE's konsole or GNOME's terminal. The easiest fix I found was setting it to color-style= , which makes it correctly respect the user's redefined terminal color scheme(s).
This setting may change the way PINE works by default for some users in ways that I am not likely to encounter during normal testing. I've learned from past experience that changing things like this results in many users discovering something no longer works how they are used to it working by default, and so I am hesitant to make such a change. Personally I dont think this level of customization fits into the realm of general distro setup. It is and should be a user customization IMHO, and as I said above, changing things like this without knowing how it affects every user on every oddball terminal out there, is just not worth it for something that can be tweaked by those minority of users who prefer it. Sorry.
For what it's worth, there was a time, though I don't remember how far back it was (v3.96?), that color-style= WAS the default. Somewhere in the 4.x.x series, this changed. I was mentioning it here only because pine's behavior had changed at some point, and I had received complaints from our users.