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Shouldn't OSS be about solving problems that people want to work on rather than trying to be a cloning engine for Microsoft software?

Bingo. Sometimes I shake my head at the lengths people go to bash M$ at every chance they get, then spend tons of effort to clone them. The first blatent one was when RH shipped thier default windowing system to be FVWM95. I still havn't gotten over that one. KDE and to an extent GNOME are not too far behind either. For example. Why in the world do they put the start thingy/taskbar/icon collector at the bottom of the screen? Because M$ put it there first. Take a look at your browser. See all the menus up top there? See the titlebar to move the window and close it etc? Shouldn't the taskbar be up there too?

Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.

Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.

Don't get me wrong. I like OS and there are beautiful examples of its success, like Apache, Linux, Galeon/Mozilla. The last one is an excellent example. I never thought of what I would want out of a browser, I just knew they all sucked a few years ago. However, Galeon is exactly what I want out of a browser.

So, what software do I use on a daily basis? Linux for an OS, WindowMaker for a window manager, mutt for email, vim for an editor, and lord forbid a closed source calendar called corporatetime. I believe that Oracle bought this, its difficult to find info about it anymore.

So what is my point? I get along just fine without M$ nor do I use any software that really has a M$ equivalent. Why do these topics come up all the time? Maybe we should be cloning M$'s slogan too. "Where do you want to go today?" It is a fitting question, right now the answer seems to be "Wherever M$ was yesterday?"

You don't have to double-click it. It open automatically when you preview.

Not if you use a real mail reader...

Yes. You can get it here. :)

But not very graphical I guess

email is not meant to be in HTML form. It's text and should always be text and never allow HTML Mail at all. Man I love mutt!! Many email programs (Entourage on the Mac, Ximian Evolution and I THINK MS Outhouse) have options to not d/l images from the net so this is easily defeated.

Huh? Many of the software packages I use are configured via plaintext files and perform extremely well, and are very easy to maintain in an enterprise enviroment.

For mail we have mutt, for IRC we have xchat or irssi or BX or epic, for composing we have vim. All highly flexible tools perfectly suitable for each job.

I bet you haven't tried to keep up with a conversation amount friends with about 300 emails in an hour with mail.yahoo.com

In my email program (mutt), I have a perl script pick randomly from ~800 different signatures. (Most new additions seem to be from the "witty comments from my daughter" category.) The script must have some sort of AI in it, because it freqently picks things that are relevant to the text. Having just a static signature for /. seems less interesting. Manually changing it certainly more work than I'm up for.

I don't want folks reading my /. posts and thinking I'm just writing them to have my sig get more notice. I don't want folks seeing my posts and assuming that they has more or less relevance because of the info in the sig. If folks want to see who I am, it's easy enough to click on my home page or /. area.

And I am very very bad at self promotion. Anything I'd write for a sig would sound pompous.

I'm really glad that you're donating money to the EFF. There are just too many people who simply don't put their money where their mouths are.

I don't have the time, energy, or know-how to do what the EFF does. But they seem to fall on the same side of every issue that I do. So I do the best I can - send them cash. Now if only we could fund EFF as well as some corporations fund lackeys on capitol hill.

Absolutely. I have a GNU/Linux (Debian) system at home which uses Fetchmail to pop emails off my ISP account. Fetchmail delivers to Postfix for local delivery. Postfix calls Procmail as part of its configuration. Procmail first pipes incoming mails through Spamassassin. If Spamassassin decides that the mail is suspect, it is placed in to a "caughtspam" mbox for later examination/deletion.

The postfix config is a basic:
mailbox_command = procmail -a "$EXTENSION"

The procmail config is as simple as:
:0fw
| spamassassin

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
caughtspam

This has cut down my personal time spent on processing emails by many many times. OK, so it's not exactly the most computationally cheap method of filtering spam, but the box isn't doing anything else particularly important and CPU cycles are cheap.

All I now need to do is go through the "caughtspam" mbox every now and again (nicely managed using Mutt) and double-check whether anything has slipped through. Only one email has been badly marked by Spamassassin and that was due to the sender incorporating lots of spam phrases in the email.

I have an SSH server set up on my DSL-connected Linux machine and pay for FastMail.fm e-mail that offers IMAP. When I want to manage my e-mail, I log on to my server from wherever I am using PuTTY (I changed the SSH port to something that most firewalls allow), and run Mutt.

I have it set up to use GPG for automatic signing -- all I do is type up an e-mail, press the send key, enter my GPG passphrase at the prompt (which is 35 alphanumeric chars,), and press Enter. My e-mail gets signed and mailed. When I receive a PGP-encrypted/signed mail, Mutt automatically decrypts it for me, again using my passphrase.

It's very convenient (setting it up is the hardest part, and that's also easy with online documentation) and very self-reliant: no special provider to go out of business, no browser to block Java, and always encryped.

..."because it's slow and messy"...

Pine was nice 10 years ago, easier to figure out (for me) than elm, nicer than mail and Mail. But, well, changes take a damned long time coming, and some things (like newsgroup support) seemed to be added for "gee whiz" reasons before things that make reading large mailing lists useful (like threading).

As others have said, most everyone with patience to learn something else has moved on. Most of the people I know have moved on to mutt. And yes, someone's pointed out to me the default keybindings match elm. I guess as you grow and learn . . .

the alternative to pico - which is the editor for pine is nano check it out...ofcourse theres mutt for the pine replacement;)

actually thats muTT.org (note the 2 T's) The story I heard about mutt was that; pine is a tree, and what do mutt's do to trees?:)

I'm still a loyal pine user, having cut my teeth first with "mail". What I've noticed, however, is that just about everyone I know who was a happy pine user is now a happy mutt user. I'm only a holdout on switching because I haven't really investigated the differences (if it ain't broke...), but my sense is that by popular majority among CLI mail readers I know, mutt is where you go to get "better-than-pine".

- DDT

Odd, while the spam I get contains lots of promises of all sorts of indecent things, I don't actually see any. There aren't even links for me to click on to get to the site. I wonder what his problem is...

HTML mail I get from a spammer...

Oh yeah! The cutting edge mail client I use, mutt, has support for not displaying HTML. What a great feature! Perhaps more email clients should add support for not displaying HTML.

The nature of email is that it's going to go downhill. Any legislative effort to stop it is only going to stifle effective communications. The spammers are already using mail servers in foreign countries. (Similarly I expect as long distance phone call cost continue to decrease to start getting telemarketers in foreign countries ignoring my state's do-no-call list.) The only effective solution is to filter at a user level (or ISP level at the user's request). For the short term, to minimize your horror at seeing it, disable viewing HTML email. (Perhaps email clients could add a "only display HTML from people in my address book option.)

The porn purveyors have taken my freedom to choose away from me. Push technology now pushes porn at me whether I like it or not.

Is Dvorak equivally as angry about his right to choose what junk mail he gets from the postal system? Both email and postal mail provide a system for random strangers to send you things you don't want. It's life. Bothered that you're "forced" to see these messages? Stop using a mail client that previews HTML.

If only there was a theme that used the OS native widgets, without the ugly 'classic' icons...

Phoenix looks like it's going that way. I would be using it right now instead of the new Mozilla beta, but Phoenix doesn't let you disable third-party cookies (you can't check the checkbox that controls third-party cookies, at least not under Win2K). Once they get that fixed, though, I'll more than likely switch over to Phoenix. All I really want is a browser. I use Mutt on my home Linux server for mail, so I don't need a mail client, and I use text editors (such as JOE or Notepad) for editing HTML and CSS.

The thing that bugs me right now about Mozilla 1.2b is that the Pinball theme doesn't work (it didn't work in Phoenix, either, and for the same reason...it hasn't been updated). Classic is ghey (as you noted), and Modern isn't much better. Pinball ought to be the default. :-)

Ewww grosss. Get away from me.

How could you possible admit to preferring either of those over vi?

Once the mozilla email client lets me choose what editor to use (like mutt has for years), I'll consider using it.

The same thing applies to their html editor. I will never subject myself to preforming menial tasks (like changing height and width values on 926 images by hand) again.

One of the strong points of Open Source software is the value of choice. Mozilla needs to allow different choices of editors before it becomes my browser of choice. Vote for this bug!!

Bringing it back on topic: Phoenix will be popular to many geeks who use vi, simply because all the "broken" editor parts of Mozilla are removed. But, chopping off functionality just treats the symptoms. Fixing bug 8589 is the solution.

The headline should be corrected to read:
In lieu of fixing Mozilla bug 8589, Phoenix 0.3 is released.

What our narrator doesn't know is that "Grandma" (which is just a hacker alias) is really 1337:

Me: Oh come on now Grandma don't be coy. You know you've been secretly sshing into my servers to check your AOL mail via Pine.

Grandma: No, no dear. Pine is for wussies. I use mutt.

Grandma: You still in there?

Who needs web-based email?

Toolkit for doing things that you aren't supposed to do at work:

• ssh
• screen
• lynx
• mutt
• epic
• ncftp

SSH to Linux box at home and "screen -r -d".

The best thing is it's all text, so it's indistinguishable from actual work to most people. And it's all encrypted.

X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=23.7 required=7.0 tests=SUBJ_HAS_SPACES,NO_REAL_NAME,OPT_IN,CLICK_BE LOW,EMAIL_MARKETING,EXCUSE _3,BIG_FONT,CLICK_HERE_LINK,MAILTO_LINK,CTYPE_JUST _HTML,DATE_IN_FUTURE,RCVD_ IN_OSIRUSOFT_COM,SUBJ_HAS_UNIQ_ID version=2.20

Now that you mention it...from NAV/Exchange on one of our servers earlier today:

Sender of the infected attachment: ******
Recipient of the infected attachment: ******
Subject of the message: W32.Klez.E removal tools
One or more attachments were quarantined. Attachment install.exe was Quarantined for the following reasons:
Virus W32.Klez.H@mm was found.

I had something similar show up at home a few days ago. IIRC, Klez grabs the subject line for its mail from a random (?) message in your inbox, so it must've gotten lucky to go out identifying itself as something that'd remove itself. (I think my copy called itself a Nimda removal tool.)

(Of course, I run qmail and mutt instead of Exchange and Lookout, so Klez has been little more than an inbox-filling annoyance for me.)

Who's the reviewer targeting here? At first glance it appears to be windows users who he wants to tell about the merits of Evolution and Linux en passant. But then he starts dropping names like CVS and fetchmail, apparently expecting his audience to know about them or at least be able to pick up their function from context. I.e. he can't be targeting Windows users.

So that suggests he's targeting people who are using Linux already. But then, if this is just an Evolution review for Linux users, why throw in the Outlook comparison and Windows snides? And why no mention of popular Linux MUAs like Mutt.

I'm left confused.

Ah! Well that explains why it sucks so bad at its attempt at doing email.

What else can run on multiple platforms?

Uh, wha? You call Windoze and OS/2 "multiple platforms"? Uh, ok...oh, and pine and mutt are multi-platform (i.e. most UNIXes and Windoze).

If you get to know it, understand it and use it, you never know, you might like it

I am forced to use it by my employer (guess who) and no, I don't like it. No technical person I have ever talked to likes it. Are you management?

Firstly, if you don't want to see any HTML, why do you refuse to use a text-mode mail client?
Secondly, mutt, setup to prefer text/plain over text/html and autoview html with html2txt does exactly what you want. No webbugs (or whatever), no downloading images, no HTML exploits.
Small, neat, efficent: just the way I like it.

You can't beat Pine for remote access.

Try mutt. It's truly free (unlike pine) and it comes loaded to the gills with features. Features which are actually usable, unlike Outhouse.

Fetchmail to retrieve the mail, procmail to filter it and mutt to read it: a beautiful combination. There's no real reason to use GUI mail--I do enough remote access that it's easier to learn the CLI client once and for all time.

There are three major points for my perfect email client:

1. Look and feel the same in X and console, so that I could make use of both xpdf/mozilla and remote mail reading.
2. Localization. Being non-native english speaker, this one is pretty important.
3. Keyboard navigation

For the last 4 years I am extremely satisfied with the combination:
- fetchmail (getting mail)
- procmail (sorting mail into mailboxes)
- mutt (reading/replying)
- vim (editing)

When it comes down to analyze mailbox and generate some reports, like for example, in the case with antivirus reports, I use perl with Mail::MboxParser module.

For all my friends, who need GUI to read email, I recommend using Mozilla and or Evolution

With all due respect to the Mutt project.

Reading the headers gives a different story ...

I've found Richochet to be quite good at deciphering the SPAM headers in my inbox and sending notices to the appropriate abuse departments. The FAQ even has a key-binding line for mutt.

It really is sad though. They took a fun company and destroyed it. It seems to be a growing trend among Corporate America. Oh well at least I have a choice. I feel sorry for all the smaller guys/gals at the company. Companies will be sorry, all the talent will go to companies that actually care about their employees (a little).
Just my .02

The Internet's greatest impact has been on the the voice it gives the public. Business is just using it as a tool, people use it to invoke change in the systems that regulate their lives.

That's pretty arguable. I mean, name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet. Sure, we're communicating faster, but has it actually provided a clear social change?

And why isn't faster communications a clear social change? Would you have cried out "name one major social change as a result of telephones!" if you were around in the early 1900s?

These days I can bank online, buy food online, pay rent online, communicate in almost-real-time with overseas relatives, find communities in my local area with similar hobbies/interests, or buy and sell things with people I've never met. How is this anything other than a social change?

Government services are increasingly online. The government is nothing more than the organised administrators of society. If the Internet is helping the government then it is directly helping society as well.

Linux is built by online communities that wouldn't exist without the Internet, and Linux is definitely helping poorer countries that wouldn't have had any options without free software. This is leading to real social changes by giving poor schools access to "expensive" software.

The physically disabled can work from home. Poorer countries with intelligent citizens can now compete directly with foreign superpowers.

The Internet is to the 21st century what the phone was to the 20th century. Initially only in the hands of the rich, then in the hands of the middle class, then in the hands of everybody and taken for granted. Sure, most of the improvements are evolutionary instead of revolutionary. The Internet has improved existing practises: there are Internet equivalents for postal mail, telephones, television, radio, and community halls. But isn't this enough? Isn't a gradual improvement enough to be called a "clear social change"? I say it is.

If I have to reconfigure ONE more window manager to do focus-follows-mouse-sloppily, I'll have to change my email address to chris@loonybin.org.

Damn! Here where I ended up they don't let us use email, so I had to sneak out to comment. :)

I know exactly how you feel. Before galeon reached its stable status I was frequently trying to find a usable browser. Now you might think that testing a browser is as simple as "./configure && make && make install", but oh no, that's just the beginning.

Before you can comfortably compare the new browser to the previous one, you have to

• configure proxies (no, $http_proxy is not supported)
• import bookmarks (hopefully browsers support XBEL in a few years or so)
• configure home page
• configure languages
• configure fonts
• turn javascript on/off
• turn java on/off
• ...I think you get the picture.

And don't get me started with MUA's. I like mutt a lot, but every now and then I feel like trying out one of those graphical MUA's just to see if I'm missing something with mutt[1]. Basic console-GUI differences aside, it's still a PITA to quickly try out a new MUA, well, basically because it's impossible to make it quick. I've already said my folders are on an IMAP servers, and I also have some local spools. Why on earth do I need to repeat it for every MUA out there?

I think the fundamental problem here is that configuration is application-based instead of being based on functionality. For example, my email address has a function, I read the mail sent to that address. It has next to nothing to do with the application I use to read the mail. Why do I have to enter that same address to every single application that needs to use my email address for whatever? (Of course there must be a way to override the default setting, but by default I shouldn't be bothered with such brainless reconfiguration!)

I know, this is all just words and as such not going to get me anywhere. Unfortunately, as it is the current situation works, barely, well enough, and I also have more urgent things to do. But maybe the next time I get frustrated enough by some new application I try so that I kick myself to do something.

----
1. So far I haven't seen anything worthwhile :)

I'm beginning to prefer Yahoo! webmail over using local clients. I can access it whereever there is a web browswer and it's always in one place.

I can download and run PuTTY through the computer's browser or (if the computer supports it) I can plug in my DiskOnKey and run PuTTY off of that. With that going, I can then log into my computer and use mutt to read my mail. With GPG installed, I can sign and/or encrypt outgoing mail and validate and/or decrypt incoming mail. Mailing lists are automatically dumped into their own directories, while other classes of mail (HTML mail and mail from known spammers, mainly) gets bounced. Try doing that with Hotmail or other webmail services.

It'd just make the "mainstream" IT community reject linux, and its users, even faster.

Which will not be as easy. My mail client (mutt) just displays everything with my settings and let me be the judge what to read and what to ignore.
Of course this assumes an RFC2822 enabled user...

I once wrote a patch to mutt which caused all messages going into sent-mail to be encrypted to myself. It worked, but it became annoying when I wanted to search my sent-mail using an external program, because nothing could read the messages.

Instead I wrote a little script run from cron which moves my sent-mail to sent-mail-(date) and encrypts the whole thing. This runs once a month. I find it's a good compromise between security and usability.

If you want some graphics and multiple windows, X11 is actually not that heavy-weight, although Gnome and KDE are. Consider running plain X11 with "twm", "fvwm", or Oroborus. Of those, "twm" is ubiquitous, while oroborus is a little more modern. For minimal graphical web browsing, consider the "dillo" web browser, although it won't work on complex sites. You could also download Opera, although it's commercial.

My favorite new vim feature is :hardcopy. This feature lets you save to postscript (or print) versions of your file that look just like what's on the screen, including syntax highlighting.

I hate to sound like every other poster on this board today :P, but emacs has been able to do this for awhile, and its postscript printouts look *sweet*. Better than vim 6's.

Before I get moderated down as off-topic, let me just say that vim 6 is badass... finally lets me use #RRGGBB values for syntax highlighting in the GUI. Whee. When the betas for 6 started appearing I spent a lot of time tweaking my .vimrc file, and now I can't even use anything else. I even use vim (with mutt) for email. It rocks.

One thing I haven't been able to figure out how to do is to auto-read and -write GPG encrypted files (I know it can't do it in a perfectly secure way, the unencrypted version may get swapped out to disk, but I don't care so much about that. If somebody gets ahold of my hard drive, whatever. My secrets aren't all that interesting anyway.) I found some .vimrc stuff to do this through google, but it didn't work (and I couldn't figure out why). Anybody know how to do this?

Tell me now Tim, have you used PGP before? I'd say that you haven't judging by your response.

Sit down and let me tell you a tale. It's a story about a little boy by the name of Kimihia (hey! that's me!) and a friend of his.

As this story begins Kimihia's friend (lets call him "Bob") has been warned by his employer not to speak to Kimihia. Bob and Kimihia are still good friends and they wish to communicate. So they turn to encryption.

Kimihia already had GPG and a GPG key (he followed a dozen commands another friend had told him to run). His key was uploaded to the PGP keyserver.

Bob found the most recent free version of PGP for his Mac. He installed it, followed it through and soon had a key. Bob retrieved Kimihia's key from the keyserver (not to difficult - searching for Kimihia's name yielded a match) and sent Kimihia an encrypted message.

When Kimihia recieved the message, mutt asked Kimihia for his PGP passphrase so it could unencrypt the message. Kimihia supplied the passphrase, and the message was unencrypted.

Kimihia replied to the message. mutt automatically offered to encrypt and sign his message (press "p" and then "b" when you are about to send your message). He accepted that. mutt encrypted then signed the message and it was on its way to Bob.

It wasn't at all hard. mutt had automatically spotted the encrypted message, it downloaded and imported the public key, then unencrypted and verified the message. All it required was the simple action of selecting the message and entering Kimihia's passphrase.

Encryption isn't hard. Stop trying to make it difficult for yourself.

On another note ... I checked out the paper. Bah, what nonsense. Half of them are red herrings. And I also notice that the only mention of what mail software they use is a single word attached to a diagram. Eudora's PGP integration causes the majority of the problems they mention.

One word:

mutt

Trust me, I've used them all. I even used to be a program manager at Microsoft (where we had rather integrated groupware, and a *lot* of mail), and nothing else has come close to handling the volume of personal email, work email, mailing lists, etc., that mutt does.

If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. If you have given up on text based email readers because pine doesn't cut it, or GUI clients because eudora and outlook express don't do it for you, then you likely haven't taken the time to realize the potential of mutt.

Maybe I'm just confused?

My biggest problem with GnuPG/PGP is using it with Mutt, my mailer of choice.

Mutt sends nice, new PGP/MIME messages. The friend with whom I communicate the most via GnuPG/PGP uses Outlook, which has no PGP/MIME support. So all of my messages to him are difficult to handle in Outlook, and all of his messages to me are a pain to decrypt in Mutt.

*sigh* When will we all be using a modern standard? There's just no chance that he'll switch to Eudora.

If it's so important to you to have encrypted email, then get a mail client that supports it. It's not like there's a shortage of them. Some are even good at it.

Yeah it sucks. More people should use software like mutt. It makes dealing with pgp-signed/encrypted messages so easy. (I hear gnus is really good too, but mutt was much easier for me to learn)

I think the best thing to do is just sign (not encrypt) all your email to your non-crypto using friends. That way they can still read your email, but they'll have to use a pgp aware mua to verify your sig. Hopefully, your friend will eventually be encouraged to use decent software to get this function. Then you're 99% of the way there and you can start exchanging encrypted emails.

Point being: Sign everything!

Try galeon out - galeon.sourceforge.net. It uses the mozilla core so it's somewhat bloated, but it renders FAST, has lots of neat features (like being able to disable status bar changes by javascript) and is pretty stable. Of course, if you're not on Linux then building Mozilla can be a daunting obstacle, but Galeon might be worth it... As for mail, mutt is king.

as for email, you may want to look into fetchmail and mutt. i used to think they were pretty old and archaic, until i really gave them a chance and began using them. mutt is the best email client i've ever used, because i can use any editor i want to compose the email, move around it with the keyboard, etc. fetchmail works exceptionally well to grab the email, which is good. you can also set up mutt to work with imap. more information on that is on mutt's website.

And besides, when was the last time you read email on an 80 column terminal?

Um, right now. If I showed you a screenshot, you would see that this window is partially covering a SSH terminal running Mutt and displaying my inbox.

http://www.mutt.org

I switched from pine to mutt about a year ago and I have found it to be much more oriented towards the power user, for example copious hooks that can be triggered by pattern matches to perform all sorts of customized behaviors. With mutt, for example, configuring your client to use gnupg is as easy as adding a line 'source gpg.rc' to include a file (included in the default distribution) that adds gnupg-specific hooks, and then adding a configuration key or two to set your personalized behavior, and you're ready.

Pine sucks. Use mutt.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.

For many languages the mutt mail reader handles the character sets well, assuming you have the fonts installed and are using either xterm or kterm (as appropriate).

If you want to edit Japanese, try jvim -- it handles left-to-right or right-to-left entry.

As regards Japanese can anyone get mutt to decode charset="ISO-2022-JP" automatically without changing the pager from the default internal pager to be "less -r"?

Try out Mutt. It most closely resembles elm, so if you're comfortable with elm the switch should be easy.

Mutt will also read mh-style folders, and can be used to convert those folders to Maildir format.

http://www.mutt.org/

I keep all mail on one machine, to which I ssh when I need to access mail.
Then I use mutt to read/write mails, which I can highly recommend (especially if you like 'vi' :)