This is more complicated than using .forward to funnel all mail to one location, but there are things you can do with IMAP that you can not do with .forward. For example, users can keep folder collections on several hosts for organizational reasons. IMAP also makes it possible for one person to grant permission to have their own mail readable by another person on a remote host. Note that the path name in inetd.conf must match the path where imapd is installed. Pine is highly configurable.
Individual users can override the system configuration by changing their own configuration file.
All together their are five ways in which a variable can be set. When pine is invoked with the -conf option, it writes a fresh copy of the system configuration file to standard output. All variables are initially unset, which means that the variable is not changed from the value defined at a lower level. Sometimes it is desirable to make a variable empty in order to remove the value defined at a lower level. An existing pine.conf is functional with the new version, but it will not have any of the new variables that may have been added for the new version.