Instead of using pine to attempt to read your email, use the mail command.

See the man page on mail for more info. If you go to use it on that site, it should come up with this:

grex.cyberspace.org% mail

Hi -- Welcome to the mail program!

Some mail tips:

+ This is an antique mail program. For a much nicer one, try pine instead.
If you do not know which mail program to use, start with pine.

+ For a list of mail commands, type help at the & prompt. For more
commands, type tilde-questionmark when you are writing a message.

+ Cc: means carbon copies. If you do not want to send copies of your
message to other people, press Enter when you see a Cc: prompt.

+ When you are done reading your incoming messages, please delete them.
For example, to delete message 5 type:
d 5

+ When you are done, type q to exit.

+ You can edit your .mailrc file to remove these overly helpful messages.

Mail version 5.5 6/1/90. Type ? for help.
"/var/spool/mail/t/g/username": 2 messages 1 new
1 someone@yahoo.c Tue Jul 27 12:09 22/796 "test email"
>N 2 someone@yahoo.c Thu Jul 29 08:30 26/889 "Re: test"