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Re: mail reader for news and mail



On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 12:06:16AM -0800, Debian User wrote:
> Any suggestions for client that reads mail *and* news?

Not one that does well at both.  There's pine, but it doesn't filter
well, or thread at all, and it's nonfree.  There's Mozilla, but it
doesn't filter well or read mail from the spool.  Then there's
Netscape, which takes everything wrong about mozilla and wraps it in a
non-free license.  If you want something better that does both, go
fire up your text editor of choice and start coding.

You don't see much software designed to do both, because the design
itself is both bad and borne of laziness.  It's not *that* hard to
open two xterms and type one command in each for starters, and it's
far better to do one function well than two craptastically.  Which is
why mail readers are just that: They read the mail and they hand mail
to be sent off to the MTA, reception is handled either by fetchmail
and an MTA or just an MTA, and delivery is handled by just an MTA.
Filtering's handled by procmail.  Each program does one thing and does
it well to make a more complete, more compact solution.

News readers either read and post straight off the spool or connect to
an NNTP server to do so, and typically also do filtering.  It would be
nice if something like procmail existed for news, but considering the
nature of news service, I can't think of a better way to handle it
than the way tin does.

BTW, news is to mail as tin is to elm, I'm wondering if there's a mutt
equivilent to tin...

-- 
 .''`.     Baloo <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org>
: :'  :    proud Debian admin and user
`. `'`
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than to fix a system

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