Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the my-first-love dept.
wasaty writes "Yesterday new PINE came out. Main new feature is (at last!) threading support. Look here for a full list of changes." Ah, my first "real" e-mail program; watching it change is like watching evolution in motion.
My school added an "amazing new webmail feature" this year, but I really wasn't that impressed with it. The sad thing is that they probably paid some company for the webmail app, even though you can download several different ones at freshmeat.net for free.
Anyway, the point is that PINE is still used today even though many consider it antiquated. For people like myself who know all the shortcuts and don't mind an all-text interface, it's superb.
So, PINE is certainly not dead, and many of us still use it on occasion when away from the office. It's much faster than VNCing into your home box and using Outlook.
Re:Still useful
by
Chicane-UK
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Indeed...
I implemented a Web Mail system where I work this year for students - downloaded for free from horde.org. Its a very powerful system and is currently serving 30,000 student accounts on a mid priced Dell server.
But back onto the topic, I have tried quite a few email applications in my time - the college where I work has recently just phased out out old POP3 Linux mail server in favour of an Exchange 2000 server. To be fair, it has been pretty good so far.
But Pine has to be one of my very favourite email apps - small, quick, and very easy to use. I even found that Windows users with no experience of *nix could get to grips with Pine pretty quickly, which is no mean feat.
I'll make sure I download this version:)
-- "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Still loyal
by
doc_traig
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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
-- So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
Re:Still loyal
by
0x0d0a
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, let's see.
Pine: * Heavily menu-based, easier to learn * Better colorization when reading letters (colorizes each level of replied-to text a different color) * Most keys easier to remember * Has a monthly sent-mail folder. You can do this in mutt, but it takes a bit of work and editing your config file.
Mutt: * More consistent keystrokes...Pine has something like three keystrokes that mean "back out of this screen" -- Q, E, and less-than. Mutt inexplicably still uses both "q" and "i", but it's somewhat better. * Unlike pine, you don't have to turn on something like 50 options to get reasonable functionality out of the program -- pine defaults to an extremely simple set of options, mutt to a much more powerful set. * really, really good PGP support * more and nicer colorization of the UI aside from the recieved mail text.
Both are fairly configurable, mutt more so. Mutt takes much more poking around and time spent to get working the way you want.
I *strongly* suggest using whichever you choose in conjunction with procmail to process your incoming mail. I sort mailing list stuff into mailing list inboxes, filter out viruses, and eat spam with procmail. A little more work to use than the more simplistic filters in a GUI email program, but very powerful, and quite a useful tool to have under the belt.
I stopped using pine as my mail client (about three years i was using it) for three reasons:
1. Doesn't support Maildir in the main code, only thru third-party patches, and pine guys rejects to add Maildir support to the code, and nobody can do it and publish it, because of their license.
The 1st and 3rd reason you gave are valid ones, the second needs explanation...
I think by "Is not GPL", he meant "is a brain-damaged PIA license that is fundamentally intolerable to most modern Linux distributions." PINE doesn't let you distributed patched binaries, meaning that distributions can't put files in LFS-compliant places or fix bugs. So Debian, and others, don't want to mess with it, and it ends up outside the packaging system for users.
I've been using Pine ever since I first had access to a shell account (at my school) in 1998. I don't particularily care about the license, as I don't develop in it. I don't particularily care that it doesn't handle newsgroups very well, as I rely on Google Groups for newsreading (I don't post). I could go on.
It's a simple interface, with everything documented WITHIN THE PROGRAM (main reason I don't use vi), and best of all, it comes with Pico, which I think is the most cool, kickass little text editor. Pico on my servers combined with Putty on my Win2k workstation equals easy code and script editing.
I've been using pine for about 7 years. I found out about it when I got my first linux install, in 1995. Not long after that I got an ISP which gave a free Unix shell account (via dialup/telnet) with the PPP account (you could buy just the shell account if you wanted.) Since it took a few days for the PPP to start working and the shell account was ready right away I started using pine and liked it.
Now at my final year at my huge university it is still what I use. It is very quick, very small, and I can get to it using every differant computer I use. (I use a *lot* of differant computers.) I see absolutly no advantage that a GUI mail client offers me. I use procmail for spam anyway, and I don't exactly have the most complex mail needs. Pine just works well and I have never said, "Oh, If only I could be able to do X".
So that is why I still use pine. Most of my freinds use it too. In a few months when I leave college I will just setup fetchmail and continue to ssh into my own box to check mail with pine.
And speaking of mutt, it is not installed on the student unix cluster my school maintains so I have never had the chance to use it.
More Pine being worked on
by
MaverickUW
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, not many people may realize it, but the UW has been working on a newer version of Pine then what was just released. Many schools have their own webmail program (UW had this really bad one for a while), but UW has been developing what it calls Webpine for a long time now accessable at webpine.washington.edu if you're a UW student (links to find out more are on the page. It works pretty well, when accessing my old UW email account, I generally log into webpine (I don't have shell access anymore so normal pine is out the window). Given time, and ways to speed the process up for those of us unfortunate enough to be on dialup (broadband isn't always the fastest for some parts of it either), and this could be really good. It's written at least partially in tcl.
Why I still use pine...
by
Tester
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes I admit it, I still use pine even if its not free software. Why? Its to my knownledge the only email client that supports remote imap properly. By that I mean one that doesnt try to re-download the whole list of all messages in the folder like mutt (Very usefull with huge folders). Evolution would probably do the job as it keeps a local copy. But it was way to unstable the last time I tried it. And I need something that I can use over the network.
Any mutt user can tell me if mutt now supports imap properly? And don't tell me gnus is the solution, even if I'm starting to consider it...
Re:IMAP in Pine
by
Simon+Lyngshede
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Pine handels one IMAP server just fine... but that's just not good enough anymore. Personally I have three imap account one three different servers, Pine doesn't not handle that well. Sure you can do it, or at leasts thats what they claim. I just gave up, it amazingly complicated to setup, just my opinion. If you just have the one IMAP server it pretty good.
Im still looking for a console mail reader that can handle multiple IMAP servers as good as Mozilla does. Any ideas ? (And no, the answer Im looking for is NOT Gnus, I hate it okay, no reason, I just dislike it in a bad way, live with it.)
Re:Pine is EVIL!!!
by
WzDD
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> Not entirely. I used to maintain PINE for
> Debian quite some time ago.
Ah, I was wondering what the maintainer thought about the whole situation.:-)
I'm maintaining Pine for a programming society at my university, and I encountered a fair bit of resistance of the "It's not Free enough" variety. While people may certainly choose to believe this, my reading of license indicated to me that it was permissible to do what I was doing - ie, compile it from source, perhaps even make local changes, as long as I changed the version number. I often wondered why the Debian Pine installer - which downloads the source, applies patches, compiles and makes a local.deb - disappeared. It's nice - I guess - to know that the reason is as I suspected: ideological, rather than due to any legitimate legal concerns.
They still got threading wrong..
by
hacker
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The stock threading in Pine 4.50 is STILL wrong, but the patch I've been running here for over a year works perfectly (in fact, my name is actually in the patch itself for a similar bug). Let me explain:
When you want to sort your mail, so the newest messages arrive at the top (normal for anyone who reads a LOT of mail), you set Pine to sort by "Reverse Arrival". Using the patch, I hit 'k', and now I expose threads, but ONLY the first message of the thread is sorted in reverse-arrival mode (as it should be). All replies to that thread are shown consecutively underneath it in normal arrival mode (replace dots for spaces, Slashdot strips them):
Nov 22...Message 1
Nov 22...Message 2
Nov 18...Message 3
Nov 19...+---Re: Message 3 (repl 1)
Nov 20.......+---Re: Message 3 (repl 2)
Nov 22...........+---Re: Message 3 (repl 3)
Nov 15...Message 4
With the threading in the new Pine 4.5, without using the threading patch (which was written by wash.edu, btw), you get:
Nov 22...Message 1
Nov 22...Message 2
Nov 22...........+---Re: Message 3 (repl 3)
Nov 20.......+---Re: Message 3 (repl 2)
Nov 19...+---Re: Message 3 (repl 1)
Nov 18...Message 3
Nov 15...Message 4
And there's no way to stop it. Sorting by Reverse-Arrival hides threads.
Sorting by Threads sorts upside-down (as above).
Sorting by Reverse-Threads puts new messages at the bottom.
I've been a happy user of Pine for 10 years (or however long it has been out), but I can't upgrade to this when such a core function is non-working like this (incidentally, don't tell me to try mutt, I've tried mutt, and it can't even come remotely close in features to what last-year's pine can do, not to mention the exploitable holes with mutt's file browser).
I guess I'll report this again, and hope that Eduardo can come up with a quick patch to fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
My school added an "amazing new webmail feature" this year, but I really wasn't that impressed with it. The sad thing is that they probably paid some company for the webmail app, even though you can download several different ones at freshmeat.net for free.
;-)
Anyway, the point is that PINE is still used today even though many consider it antiquated. For people like myself who know all the shortcuts and don't mind an all-text interface, it's superb.
So, PINE is certainly not dead, and many of us still use it on occasion when away from the office. It's much faster than VNCing into your home box and using Outlook.
When you're on the go, give PINE a call
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
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
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
I stopped using pine as my mail client (about three years
i was using it) for three reasons:
1. Doesn't support Maildir in the main code, only thru third-party patches, and pine guys rejects to add Maildir
support to the code, and nobody can do it and publish it,
because of their license.
2. Is not GPL
3. Mutt is waaaaay more configurable
There even exists a perl script to help the transition: pine2mutt (disclaimer: I still use pine).
Linus Torvalds uses it (as email headers from his lkml messages confirm).
I've been using Pine ever since I first had access to a shell account (at my school) in 1998. I don't particularily care about the license, as I don't develop in it. I don't particularily care that it doesn't handle newsgroups very well, as I rely on Google Groups for newsreading (I don't post). I could go on.
It's a simple interface, with everything documented WITHIN THE PROGRAM (main reason I don't use vi), and best of all, it comes with Pico, which I think is the most cool, kickass little text editor. Pico on my servers combined with Putty on my Win2k workstation equals easy code and script editing.
Anyway, just my two simolians.
I've been using pine for about 7 years. I found out about it when I got my first linux install, in 1995. Not long after that I got an ISP which gave a free Unix shell account (via dialup/telnet) with the PPP account (you could buy just the shell account if you wanted.) Since it took a few days for the PPP to start working and the shell account was ready right away I started using pine and liked it.
Now at my final year at my huge university it is still what I use. It is very quick, very small, and I can get to it using every differant computer I use. (I use a *lot* of differant computers.) I see absolutly no advantage that a GUI mail client offers me. I use procmail for spam anyway, and I don't exactly have the most complex mail needs. Pine just works well and I have never said, "Oh, If only I could be able to do X".
So that is why I still use pine. Most of my freinds use it too. In a few months when I leave college I will just setup fetchmail and continue to ssh into my own box to check mail with pine.
And speaking of mutt, it is not installed on the student unix cluster my school maintains so I have never had the chance to use it.
Well, not many people may realize it, but the UW has been working on a newer version of Pine then what was just released. Many schools have their own webmail program (UW had this really bad one for a while), but UW has been developing what it calls Webpine for a long time now accessable at webpine.washington.edu if you're a UW student (links to find out more are on the page. It works pretty well, when accessing my old UW email account, I generally log into webpine (I don't have shell access anymore so normal pine is out the window). Given time, and ways to speed the process up for those of us unfortunate enough to be on dialup (broadband isn't always the fastest for some parts of it either), and this could be really good. It's written at least partially in tcl.
Yes I admit it, I still use pine even if its not free software. Why? Its to my knownledge the only email client that supports remote imap properly. By that I mean one that doesnt try to re-download the whole list of all messages in the folder like mutt (Very usefull with huge folders). Evolution would probably do the job as it keeps a local copy. But it was way to unstable the last time I tried it. And I need something that I can use over the network.
Any mutt user can tell me if mutt now supports imap properly? And don't tell me gnus is the solution, even if I'm starting to consider it...
Pine handels one IMAP server just fine... but that's just not good enough anymore. Personally I have three imap account one three different servers, Pine doesn't not handle that well. Sure you can do it, or at leasts thats what they claim. I just gave up, it amazingly complicated to setup, just my opinion. If you just have the one IMAP server it pretty good.
Im still looking for a console mail reader that can handle multiple IMAP servers as good as Mozilla does. Any ideas ? (And no, the answer Im looking for is NOT Gnus, I hate it okay, no reason, I just dislike it in a bad way, live with it.)
> Debian quite some time ago.
Ah, I was wondering what the maintainer thought about the whole situation. :-)
I'm maintaining Pine for a programming society at my university, and I encountered a fair bit of resistance of the "It's not Free enough" variety. While people may certainly choose to believe this, my reading of license indicated to me that it was permissible to do what I was doing - ie, compile it from source, perhaps even make local changes, as long as I changed the version number. I often wondered why the Debian Pine installer - which downloads the source, applies patches, compiles and makes a local .deb - disappeared. It's nice - I guess - to know that the reason is as I suspected: ideological, rather than due to any legitimate legal concerns.
When you want to sort your mail, so the newest messages arrive at the top (normal for anyone who reads a LOT of mail), you set Pine to sort by "Reverse Arrival". Using the patch, I hit 'k', and now I expose threads, but ONLY the first message of the thread is sorted in reverse-arrival mode (as it should be). All replies to that thread are shown consecutively underneath it in normal arrival mode (replace dots for spaces, Slashdot strips them):
With the threading in the new Pine 4.5, without using the threading patch (which was written by wash.edu, btw), you get:
And there's no way to stop it. Sorting by Reverse-Arrival hides threads.
Sorting by Threads sorts upside-down (as above).
Sorting by Reverse-Threads puts new messages at the bottom.
I've been a happy user of Pine for 10 years (or however long it has been out), but I can't upgrade to this when such a core function is non-working like this (incidentally, don't tell me to try mutt, I've tried mutt, and it can't even come remotely close in features to what last-year's pine can do, not to mention the exploitable holes with mutt's file browser).
I guess I'll report this again, and hope that Eduardo can come up with a quick patch to fix it.