Re: [Rant] The Endless Search for a Mail Client That Doesn't Suck
On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Brian Nelson wrote:
Hi Brian,
understand your agony, haven't found the almighty email client, but am
using Pine 4.58 quite happily:
BN> 1. I must be able to customize the order folders, and I don't want to
BN> give them retardedly ugly names to force a correct alphabetic order.
BN> This is very important when you have 70 freaking folders like I do.
The order of the Inboxes can be freely customized. In addition to IMAP and
POP3 folders, any file on the local file system can be an Inbox
BN> 2. I must be able to read the folders sequentially in the order I
BN> specify with minimal pain. Obviously, I read from highest priority
BN> to lowest, since I may not have time to read every single folder. I
BN> don't want to be interrupted while in the sequence, because old mails
BN> in lower priority folders are more important to me than brand new
BN> mails in higher priority ones.
At the end of the current folder press "TAB" and it will open the next
folder and display the next new message
BN> 3. I must have a powerful editor. Emacs is generally my first choice,
BN> but I'd be willing to learn another as long as it could do everything
BN> I do in emacs.
You can choose any editor you like, either by specification in the config
file or by pressing "Ctrl-_" when composing a message (which lets you then
choose an editor on the fly).
BN> 4. It must support Maildir, and must play nicely with offlineimap.
I am told it supports Maildir, don't know anything about offlineimap. I am
using multiple IMAP folders (currently about 15 IMAP and POP Inboxes and
200 folders on an IMAP server for saving and archiving) without any
problems.
BN> 5. It must have a decent summary view. I want to be able to see all of
BN> my folders, the amount of mail in each, and be able to quickly choose
BN> one to view the mail.
At least one of the developers provides patches (which are always updated
for new versions of the programme) for providing additional functionality,
like the summary view you are talking about. Have never used these though!
BN> 6. It must have a decent expiry system.
Don't exactly know what you mean. You can choose messages in a folder
according to several properties (read, new, date arrived, date sent,
number, content, headers, sender, recipient, .....), so it only takes a
few keystrokes to do the expiring. This can partly be automated by
applying filters. I don't know if these filters (which work well for me
for filtering out spam) can be dynamic (i.e. use the current date minus 2
weeks for example as the selection property)
BN> 7. It must not be dog slow. I have big folders and I don't want to wait
BN> 5 minutes to load them.
That very much depends on the speed of the connection. For local files
Pine is very fast, for slow connections, it offers a prompt ("Cancel
connection?") after a user-defined time when it is not yet finished with
downloading/searching/scanning. Still, while busy, Pine is unusable, since
it is also not working in multiple threads. The latter thing can be
annoying when sending mail over a slow link.
One of the most prominent features of Pine (which makes me stick to it
nomatterwhat) is, that you can store the configuration on a remote IMAP
server and never have to worry about synching your settings between
machines. You can use it from wherever you are (providing it is installed,
or you have it on your USB stick [the Windows version runs standalone from
a floppy/CD/USBstick]).
It also supports mailing list management functions.
Some drawbacks:
Searching and selecting over multiple folders is cumbersome and sometimes
faulty. Within one folder, searching works excellent.
The Windows version has (rare) problems with faulty SSL implementation in
Windows (really not a Pine problem).
Navigation in the included editor (Pico) is cumbersome.
Multiple attachments can only be saved one-at-a-time.
UTF-8 is not supported (in Pine 4.58, but I think it has been built into
Pine 4.61??)
You are bound to the charset encoding given in the configuration, no
on-the-fly changing.
Best regards, Stefan (debian @ goessling . de)
PS: More info here: http://www.washington.edu/pine/
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