This is a trick I call "Pine Cent". CentOS doesn't come with Pine installed, so if you want a text based mailer, you're stuck with "mail".

So here's what I do on all my CentOS servers:

(in bash):

# alias pine=mutt

(in tcsh):

> alias pine mutt

It's kinda a joke, because well mutt is a very nice text mode email client. Being an old user of unix from way back, something in my brain is hardwired to type "pine" when I want to read email.

Note, the learning curve is a bit steep if you are accustomed to pine, but mutt is just as powerful, if not more so. If you're a mutt "power user" I'd love to see some things you've done with it.