Gmail vs Pine

Snarfed has an interesting review on Gmail vs Pine. From the article: "I've used Pine as my email client for, well, pretty much forever. I use it because it's fast, powerful, stable, and very keyboardable. (I hate the mouse.) However, since I work at Google, I'm constantly bombarded with people who ask me why I don't use Gmail. After hearing the nth person brag about how much it increased their productivity, I finally broke down and tried it. I didn't expect much, since I've never liked web-based email clients. However, I made myself use it as my only email client, for a month, to give it a fair shot."

Comments

One Point For Gmail

[TheComputerMutt.ca]

It can be used anywhere, without needing to install anything. I like some IMAP clients, but this is why I chose Gmail over them.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[trickonion]

What about WEBpine? That sorta kills that argument.

(What it doesn't kill is that pine still sucks, gmail for life!)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[russianspy]

I always access my pine from one computer. If you can check your email, you can ssh somewhere to run pine. That way I have all my email in one place - that's still under my control.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Jon Luckey]

It can be used anywhere, without needing to install anything.

Cool!

Now tell me how I can use it with from my shell account with the lynx browser that doesn't support https much less javascript.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Richard Steiner]

Use Links instead from the console. Some variants support both SSL and Javascript.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[timster]

GMail works for me from Lynx, as it does not require Javascript. Of course, my version of Lynx supports HTTPS just fine.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[RLiegh]

It doesn't work with MS-DOS 3.0 either; but no one is complaining about that. Seriously, here's no reason, in this day and age, that you can't access the internet through a legitimate ISP (at work if not at home), using a java-script enabled browser. The days of needing to log in to a shell account in order to surf the web died before the first dot-com bubble.

As far as SSL support goes, Lynx has had SSL support since at least 2000 (if not before), if your "shell provider" is running software which is 6 years out of date, I'd suggest that you probably have larger problems to worry about (ranging from version incompatibilities in applications such as gas and gcc to the obvious security concerns).

If -somehow- they're running a newer version of lynx with ssl compiled out, they're a crap provider and you should drop them. If you have no other browser except for a CLI browser provided through some dodgy shell account (which you're logging on to with what network connection, exactly?) then I suppose you can use yahoo mail (they bitch, but you can still read you emails, though I doubt you can send them any more).

Re:One Point For Gmail

[DanielNS84]

So I can ssh from behind the best buy proxy to check my mail now? Awesome! In all seriousness...I still have to forward my gmail to my best buy account to get any mail from work.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[x2A]

You access pine directly from the shell, not from the browser... IOW, quit lynx, and type 'pine'

Re:One Point For Gmail

[CaptainTux]

Just logged into GMail from my shell using Lynx. You were saying?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Florian]

You can also use pine (better: mutt) everywhere if you use into on a machine that can be accessed via SSH - either your home machine or over an ISP that offers shell accounts.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[diersing]

Right now I have 2.7GB storage on GMail.
I don't need a client with GMail.
I can access my GMail from home.
I can access my GMail from work.
I can access my GMail from my phone.
GMail is yet to allow a piece of spam into my inbox.

I admint to never using WebPine, but can it meet those 6 things?

Hey GMail, build in a POP/IMAP client so I can get ALL my email in one-east-to-use interface.... please?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[peragrin]

Um no you can't. Most independant wi-fi points, block none http traffic. No ssh,ftp, IM,torrents, etc.

So you can't check your pine email anywhere. Most places, and it is more secure but not just anywhere.

For the record I used to sue putty and pine and occasionally w3m From my work machine to my home machine. I even modified the Unix mail folders, to work with both Pine and Kmail. Now that was fun.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Outlook?

Just kidding!

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

>You were saying?
Something about how he's too lazy to find a decent shell account.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Sloppy]

It can be used anywhere, without needing to install anything

It sounds like you read your email from other peoples' computers, which could be sniffing who-knows-what. If privacy means that little to you, then you don't need email at all; you might as well just use Usenet.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Kadin2048]

You might be able to, if you were running your own MTA (I like Postfix, personally) and you set it up to listen for incoming SSH connections on port 80 instead of 22; I'm not sure how smart the filters are at BestBuy, but if they're working just off of the ports, that ought to do the trick.

And your mailserver and be any old PC with a NIC; a 486 ought to do fine, since all it has to do is download your mail from your ISPs server and store it so you can get at it with PINE, running it as a local user in a SSH session.

There might be more elegant ways to do it, but that struck me as reasonably easy to construct, provided you have a computer at home that's always connected to the internet.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[masklinn]

Lynx does support HTTPS, and GMail does work with Javascript disabled.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[wdr1]

Most independant wi-fi points, block none http traffic. No ssh,ftp, IM,torrents, etc.

I haven't found that to be true. I've jumped on a half-dozen random independant wi-fi points through-out the US (LAS airport, T-Mobile's network, SBC's, various small coffee shops, libraries, hotels, etc.) and have *never* run into either SSH or Yahoo IM being blocked.

Where are you trying from? Sounds oddly restrictive.

-Bill

Re:One Point For Gmail

[DougDot]

A warning about gmail: I like it, but it constantly finds itself blacklisted by a number of spam control services, such as http://www.mail-abuse.com/ [mail-abuse.com]. As a result, I cannot use gmail to send to co-workers, because my company's IT dept. uses the above service. The gmail team either does not care that many organizations simply will not receive mail sent via gmail, or are unable to prevent gmail from being repeatedly blacklisted. Messages to the gmail support team about this issue appear to fall into a black hole. This is curious to me, since even hotmail was able to figure out how to keep from being constantly blacklisted.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Aranth Brainfire]

"though I doubt you can send them any more"

Don't worry, you can just send them from someone else's hotmail account.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[xystren]

I'm still running DOS 3.0 you insensitive clod!

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Um no you can't. Most independant wi-fi points, block none http traffic. No ssh,ftp, IM,torrents, etc.

If you have a problem with blocked non-web ports, change your SSHD server to run on, say port 443. That way it won't interfere or show up as an ordinary www server on your home system unless you explicitely need HTTPS, but, it shouldn't actually be blocked unless the proxy is strict beyond excuse.

I'm all for Gmail, but, the alternatives shouldn't be discounted because of things like that. It should be a matter of personal preference, not what they force you to use.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[maxume]

Mods, please see:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182257&cid=150 71383

Re:One Point For Gmail

[danimrich]

I was recently staying at a place where the only Internet access I could get (from my bed ;-) was some wireless network with a firewall that blocked almost everything but ssh. I was quite happy ssh-ing to a server where I could run lynx, pine and mutt.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[coleridge78]

A perspective from someone who deals with this issue... the reason that Gmail smtp servers end up blacklisted is always (in my experience) due to lag in DNS changes, particularly in propogation of reverse DNS after they change IP ranges entirely.

As opposed to Hotmail, et al, which generally are blacklisted for actual bad acts, like acting as open relays or pumping spam for money and disclaiming responsibility via their various "affiliate" programs.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[chrisatoremus]

the link has been /. effect-ed

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

1. Right now I have 2.7GB storage on GMail.
   Right now, I have 200+ GB of storage available to Pine. Not that I'll ever need it, but it is there.

2. I don't need a client with GMail.
   I don't need a client with Pine — Pine is the client, and it runs on my home machine, no matter where I access it from. Which reduces the client-side needs considerably. All I need is a shell of a few K in any computer system. You, on the other hand, require a multi-megabyte browser that supports client-side operations.

3. I can access my GMail from home.
   I can access Pine from home

4. I can access my GMail from work.
   I can access Pine from work.

5. I can access my GMail from my phone.
   I can access Pine from my phone. And my PSP. And my Palm. And my old Amiga. And my Mac. My old 64k OS9/6809 system. And my various other old systems that don't support Java and other client-side technologies. And any *nix system on the planet. I look forward to being able to check my email from my PS3, when they finally get it out the door. All I need is a telnet or (preferably) secure shell, and as they're saying it is linux based.... done deal, probably. I have a dial-up connection on my linux machine that allows me to log in from the oldest, lamest modem I am ever likely to run into. And yes, from there... I can run Pine.

6. GMail is yet to allow a piece of spam into my inbox.
   Pine can take advantage of all manner of cool and innovative spam filters and other kinds of filters. Bayesian, white/blacklist based, custom, you name it. There's no spam in my Pine mailbox at all. Also, there are no ads. You, on the other hand, have Google providing ad content all the time you use GMail. Which is not a lot different from constantly being spammed, at least, to me.

That's not all. You are allowing Google to both hold your messages (privacy may become an issue at some point) and you rely on them to stay available to you — they could decide to drop GMail at any time, or the servers could crash, etc. If you use Pine, you have complete control: You are storing your own data, you can implement any backup technology that satisfies your need for security and data retention, there are no extra privacy issues to speak of, the goverment can't get your private messages with a general legal attack on Google.

Don't kid yourself. If you are comfortable on the command line, there are a million programs that will do all manner of cool things for you. Pine, however, is menu-driven and because of that it is generally easy to use for just about anyone, and it doesn't require anywhere near the usual savvy we associate with CLI-mavens.

I'm not saying you should turn to Pine, either. The version of Pine I am familiar with doesn't do HTML for crap, can't embed images, doesn't do formatting and so on. I don't care, because I actually use email to communicate words, silly me. :-) But don't for a minute think that it isn't accessible, practical, powerful, and full of cool features. It is all of that, and more.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Blackjetta]

That was simply EXCELLENT to see this spelled out.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[alanmaupin]

gmail vs pine Created by ryan. Last edited by ryan, 45 days ago. Viewed 1,785 times. #19 [diff] [history] [edit] [rdf] labels attachments gloves.jpg (13082) gmail.png (2934) pine.png (702) link=http://washington.edu/pine/ gloves link=http://gmail.com/ I've used >>Pine as my email client for, well, pretty much forever. I use it because it's fast, powerful, stable, and very keyboardable. (I hate the mouse.) However, since I work at >>Google, I'm constantly bombarded with people who ask me why I don't use >>Gmail. After hearing the nth person brag about how much it increased their productivity, I finally broke down and tried it. I didn't expect much, since I've never liked web-based email clients. However, I made myself use it as my only email client, for a month, to give it a fair shot. I ended up using it for five weeks, and while I eventually switched back to Pine, I liked Gmail a lot more than I expected. It made me question lots of things I took for granted, and showed me that there's plenty of innovation left in email clients. I'm currently >>writing patches for Pine to implement the features I miss most from Gmail. (Many people have gone the other direction and written >>Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail to add features and customize it to their liking.) Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly of Gmail, compared to Pine. My opinions are not those of my employer, look both ways before crossing the street, don't run with scissors, etc. The Good * It's somewhat faster than your average IMAP server. (Of course, this is both a success of Gmail and a failing of most IMAP servers.) * Gmail is smart about hiding quoted text and emails i've seen. This rocks. Somehow it even knows the 1% of cases where I actually do want to see the quoted text. I have no idea how. * The UI for threading, or >>conversations in Gmail lingo, rocks even harder. The killer feature is that the bodies of all messages in the thread on a single screen. Combined with hiding quoted text, this is very powerful. * Mail is indexed. My average search takes under a second in Gmail, but around 10 seconds in Pine. * >>Tags, aka labels or virtual folders, are all the rage these days. GMail's implementation of them is slick, and eminently usable. Pine's >>keywords offer most of the same functionality, but compared to Gmail, they're a little clunky. * There are keyboard shortcuts! Wonder of wonders, it's a webapp that has keyboard shortcuts. Even more amazing, I can actually do most of my normal email tasks with the keyboard shortcuts only. If I couldn't, I never would have given Gmail a second glance. * I love the Y key, a single keystroke for archiving email. Archiving in pine takes two keystrokes at best, and four if I last saved to a different folder than my "archive" folder. * The address book is great, mostly because I never have to use it. Gmail automatically remembers everyone I've sent email to or received email from, and auto-completes when I start type their name or email address. I wish Pine did this! The Bad * Filtering has a great UI, but it's horribly weak. It has maybe a third of the headers and options that I normally filter on. You can't OR or NOT filter conditions. The set of filter actions is anemic, even with labels. Want me to go on? * There's no way to bounce an email. This should be pretty trivial to add. * If no email is selected, the Y key should archive the email under the cursor. This should be common sense. * You can't automatically create a filter based on an email. Why not? * You can search, but you can't select messages based on headers, subject, or body text. Worse, if you have more messages than fit on the screen, you can't select any messages that aren't on the screen. If you ever get flooded with email, or with spam that escapes the spam filters, god help you. * Thank god there are keyboard shortcuts...but there aren't nearly enough! I don't mind using the mouse for one-time stuff, but if i have to use it often during my n

Re:One Point For Gmail

[ampmouse]

And if the proxy is so strict that port 443 is blocked, you can't use gmail anyway. The login page/iframe only works on https.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[__aabwba5127]

What I don't understand is why he's comparing Pine to Gmail. I mean it's a relatively obscure client for IMAP accounts... How about a review of OE or Thunderbird, clients that a significant amount of ppl use?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[denttford]

You know, at the last place i worked, gmail grew in usage from about 2 people to about 20 in about a month. And then it got filtered. Prefacing the address of the login page with https instead of http (a habit from quick and dirty solution to a home problem) got by the http block just fine. I had never even noticed it was filtered. Not usually going to work, but worth a shot if you are in those circumstances. And if it does work, well, keep it to yourself - IT may know, but the receptionist won't. It has been my experience that IT won't proactively block something if 99% of users can't figure it out and it doesn't pose a security threat, especially if they might use themselves (yes, they too were generally blocked).

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Andrew Kismet]

Welcome to the modern paranoid age, too scared to even use email at a friend's house.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[crazygamer]

I can access Pine from my phone. And my PSP. And my Palm. And my old Amiga. And my Mac. My old 64k OS9/6809 system. And my various other old systems that don't support Java and other client-side technologies. And any *nix system on the planet. I look forward to being able to check my email from my PS3, when they finally get it out the door. All I need is a telnet or (preferably) secure shell, and as they're saying it is linux based.... done deal, probably. I have a dial-up connection on my linux machine that allows me to log in from the oldest, lamest modem I am ever likely to run into. And yes, from there... I can run Pine.

GMail only uses javascript (supported by any browser that wants to have more than 1 person download it) for the client-side code.

The lite version doesn't even use that. It's pure HTML, maybe a little bit of basic js that won't change the way it works.

Most, or even all, of the devices you mentioned have a browser already on them which can in fact access gmail.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can maintain your server and keep it running, then pine is fine. However, some firewall will block telnet ports, so you'd be out of luck. Also, let's say you're on the road and your server is down, who's going to get it running again for you? gmail has loads of people to maintain their service.

Personally, as long as I can read my mail, any client will do. It's the ability to access it to read it and have guarantee uptime that concern me more.

2bits.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[ares284]

A bit off-subject, but where did you get it from? Is it a Win32 version? I can't quite get it to work with HTTPS.

Thanks,
-Ares

Re:One Point For Gmail

[h3]

> Welcome to the modern paranoid age, too scared to even use email at a friend's house.

I guess I'm paranoid. My basic assumption is that any and every Windows machine has been rooted and has a keylogger running. I'd never type a password to something whose security I cared for on a Windows machine. People talk about carrying around putty and stuff on a USB flash drive, but I don't see how that's secure at all!

It's not just Windows - I'm not too keen on typing important passwords on a Mac/Linux box of some random person either. But I'm more likely to take the risk in a pinch.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[mooncaine]

One advantage of GMail we forgot to add: you can use it without having to fart around with installing anything, even Pine. Most consumer-grade computers you encounter are already set up to use GMail.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Siward]

The discourse that's really missing in this discussion is about demographics. Most casual computer users use webmail I'd wager that a lot of serious computer users do too. Webmail has been around so long that it's become ubiquitous. Logging into my GMail account is simple, and I don't have to carry a thumbdrive with a portable version of putty and whatever else on it in order to get my e-mail from a client/interface that I'm comfortable using.

I have never in my life understood the storage space arguement, and it was one reason I resisted moving from Hotmail to GMail (I have to admit, it's embarassing now to think that I resisted moving away from Hotmail) -- Google's 2GB promotion point made it seem like that was the only reason you'd want to switch over. I'm currently using a whopping 45 megs of space on my GMail account (this includes about 400 e-mails from particular mailing lists I subscribe to). If you ask me, GMail is popular because it's web-based, people are comfortable with web-based clients, and it's surely the fastest and (arguably) the best web-based e-mail service around.

Are the features worthwhile? I guess that depends on who you ask. I think labels are the dumbest "feature" in GMail. If I see that I have mail in more than one label, I (and I imagine most people) instinctively think that I have two separate, distinct e-mails. Not one e-mail that falls under multiple categories for some godforsaken reason. The whole GMail ads point is moot under these (webmail) circumstances too. If you think GMail's text ads are intrusive, take some heart medicine and then create a Hotmail account. It's been years since I logged into my Yahoo e-mail account, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's on a similar level.

Ultimately, people use what they're comfortable with. I'm not so particular about my e-mail that I need to have a system-based client configured the way I like it, but I'm particular enough that I don't want to use a different web-based e-mail provider -- GMail does what I want, is fast (for webmail), and is simple, so that's what I use.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[izomiac]

1. But your 200+ GB is on your own hardware. That may be good for privacy concerns (I agree with you completely there), but what happens if it goes down while you're away, or if the harddrive(s) fails? (Or however many it takes for your RAID array to loose data, either way I'm betting Google is more reliable.) That's also 200+ GB that you can't use for something else. Hardware might be cheap, but Gmail is free. (Not to mention that some people don't have a spare computer to run this on.)

2. You still need a telnet client. Since most people don't use them there's a fair chance that some locked-down PC you try to use will let you use a web browser, but not the command line/telnet. Also, if you care about privacy telnet isn't a very good idea (especially since Windows machines don't have anything capable of using the SSL version preinstalled AFAIK).

3 & 4. Same point as above. Also, with Gmail Google is paying for the bandwidth but with Pine you are (cheap as it might be). There's also the issue of your network going down, your ISP doing maintainance, or whatever else.

5. I don't own a cell phone and have never tried/wanted to do check my mail that way.

6. I'm guessing that Gmail does this without any effort on your part (including initial).


Just pointing out a few cons of your approach. On the other hand, I use BeMail myself, so I suppose I shouldn't critize the versitility of other approaches...

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Brandybuck]

I can access my mail account with my ISP using any browser on the planet. That's because my ISP isn't Google. Otherwise I would have to *install* a second browser, like Firefox, to get to it.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[beetlefeet]

Or just run it on say port 80 instead of the telnet port (23 is it?)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[syousef]

Lucky you. Where I work they just blocked all web based email despite legitimate business arguments to keep it.

Sammy

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Or he can fire up Dyndns, apache, and mindterm.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't provide the level of data security/redundancy that Google can (ie 99% availability, 100% redundancy) at the same price point (ie free). Can you?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[ktappe]

I can access my GMail from work.
I can access Pine from work.

I'm glad to hear your employer allows you to get out through (presumably) ssh, but not all employers do. Thus it's more likely that your average user would be able to access Gmail from work than pine. My current employer (a major bank) blocks both.

-Kurt

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

That 200 is, as you surmise, raid. Current uptime is...

22:16:40 up 550 days, 11:40, 8 users, load average: 0.02, 0.13, 0.16

...(this is a redhat 9 machine, no uncontrolled reboots, restarts, or failures, powered by a 1500 watt 100% online [sinewave] UPS.) Backup is every evening to a separate machine done via cron controlled copy, then archive and copy. If the main server fails, I can log into the backup machine. It's been up less time because I stuck a sound card in it (cheap Dell server — no sound) and had to turn it off to do so. Just 403 days. So as you can see, I don't much worry about my mail system going down when I go out of town. :-)

either way I'm betting Google is more reliable.

I bet they're not. My arrangement has been rock solid, and Google's complexity is its own curse. :-)

You still need a telnet client.

Not a problem. I have one on a USB drive in my man-purse (yes, I carry one... so I have wallet, some tools, pocket knife, palm, PSP, reading glasses (I'm old), all manner of stuff.) In the USB stick is a copy of Putty which covers PCs. I also have my PSP and my Palm, both of which have secure clients (the Palm one is wonderful, but I have to take off my glasses to read the fonts... they're insanely small, yet readable. Here's a pic of it I just took.) I don't have a real keyboard for the PSP so it is my last choice, but it *is* there. And if the PC can't read the USB stick, Putty is available all over the net. If it's a modern Mac, then it's already got the software it needs, because underneath, a modern Mac is a *nix creature at heart. If the PC itself has a firewall that doesn't allow outgoing SSH ports (I've never run into this, btw) or it's a stone-age Mac (which I really don't know much about in its pre-*nix configurations, and which I have run into), then I can find a wifi connection somewhere and slip in that way using the Palm. It's really not a problem — I have considerably more options than you do with a browser, and btw, no, there are no browsers on a lot of the older machines. Hard to run a GUI browser in 64k of ram, but a terminal emulator will still run just fine.

Also, with Gmail Google is paying for the bandwidth but with Pine you are (cheap as it might be).

Nope. My bandwidth isn't metered — I pay the same if I have no connection or if data is flowing all the time.

There's also the issue of your network going down, your ISP doing maintainance, or whatever else.

Um. Well, mine, Google's, same thing, really. Problem related outages can be reasonably considered random. Except I've not been down in years, and Google is down quite often. Though not for long. Mainly because they're always messing with stuff, and mine is 100% stable.

One more advantage: I have all my incoming and outgoing email all the way back to Compuserve days in the late 1980's. All of it. I can search it, noodle over it, sort it, filter it... it's fun.

In the end, again, I'm not suggesting anyone make the change. If they're comfortable with CLI stuff and *nix they're probably already well aware of the huge number of options available to them. I'm happy with how my stuff works, the reliability and flexibility are awesome and I'm independent of anyone else as far as it is possible to be.

I've even got (very slow) SSH access via encapsulated packet radio (I'm a ham radio person, callsign is AA7AS) from my car and boat if I'm anywhere the hams have packet stuff running. I use this in the summer from my boat out on Fort Peck lake here in Montana — the lake is freaking huge. I rock collect out there, swim, and chase my sweetheart around the boat. Which always works out in my favor, as it's only a 28-footer. :-)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

Yep, as I said, I'm not suggesting this is for everyone. But it works great for me. As for my employer — I am my employer, mostly. Me and the IRS, anyway. Black Belt Systems is my company. I've been building the company since 1985. We do graphics software. Used to do graphics and microcontroller hardware, but the margins... yech.

My post was about Pine's capabilities. Not about converting people to use Pine. I'm enthusiastic about it, but not evangelistic. Fair enough?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[raju1kabir]

If you can maintain your server and keep it running, then pine is fine. However, some firewall will block telnet ports, so you'd be out of luck.

Telnet?? Who uses that?

I run sshd on port 22 and 443, pretty much always works.

Also, let's say you're on the road and your server is down, who's going to get it running again for you?

Start a bandwidth cooperative at a colo with a few friends. Whoever's around can deal with it.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[raju1kabir]

I'm glad to hear your employer allows you to get out through (presumably) ssh, but not all employers do. Thus it's more likely that your average user would be able to access Gmail from work than pine. My current employer (a major bank) blocks both.

If you can access any arbitrary net resource at all (web site, DNS information, whatever), you can find a way to tunnel SSH. I have never been somewhere where I could not, and I do a lot of on-site work in strange and sometimes sensitive places.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[kwark]

There is no big difference except that they need a little extra complexity to get the graphics running, but throw in a X/VNC/RDP/ICA client and all is the same.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[lisaparratt]

Um, what makes you think you can't access mail stored on an IMAP server from anywhere?

Even better, on my phone, the default client just works - runs off and downloads any new headers every 10 minutes. Maybe not quite as snappy as a Blackberry, but a damned sight better than any webmail service can do.

Back home, Mail.app and Spotlight give me all the searchy goodness I could want. My free space is limited by how many old HDDs I'm willing to throw into the server. My mail is spam filtered, and despite my not having a Windows PC, virus checked.

Plus, if the worse comes to the worse, and I can't access it any other way, I can always fall back sshing into the server, and running pine.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[BerkeleyDude]

Saying that pine is better than GMail is like saying that beer is better than women...

(But ok, to be fair, I agree that web-based interfaces suck :)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[AVee]

I'm glad to hear your employer allows you to get out through (presumably) ssh, but not all employers do. Thus it's more likely that your average user would be able to access Gmail from work than pine. My current employer (a major bank) blocks both.

Start with running you're sshd on port 443, try again. If it doesn't work try connecting via the companies proxy.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[spriteboy]

Offtopic: You seem to have gone a long way to ensure that you can check you mail from anywhere ;)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[chrj]

Most consumer-grade computers you encounter are already set up to use GMail

This argument doesn't hold. Slashdot users are not your average consumer. Or at least - most Slashdot users aren't :-)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[chrj]

Offtopic: You seem to have gone a long way to ensure that you can check you mail from anywhere ;)

... and a long time without a kernel security update :-)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Zemran]

The main thing I hate web clients for is that they assume that you have a rocket ship speed internet connection. Most of the planet is still using modems and copper wire and those with ADSL or better are too quick to forget the rest of us. I do have a Gmail account and while I am in the internet cafe I check it (like now) but the rest of the time I use pop and drop. Gmail seems to be the most bandwidth hungry of the web clients that I have tried and on a bad ADSL connection (like at work) I just cannot get through even though I can log into Yahoo etc. I have nothing against those that want, having, but don't knock the tools that keep the rest of us on the road.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Mr Z]

FWIW, I'm with you on just about all that. Only, personally, I prefer Mutt to Pine, since I started w/ dmail and Elm. With appropriate filters, Mutt seems to handle HTML and Word docs acceptably most of the time. (I use elinks and wvText for those two file types.) And then there's GPG for the occasional encrypted email I need to send.

All that said, I still use GMail for my personal mail. I use Mutt for most of my work email.

--Joe

Re:One Point For Gmail

[somersault]

likewise, most computers for the last 15 years at least will have had some kind of remote shell ability, so if they're connected to the net, then you can connect to a remote system and check your pine main anywhere. I just use hotmail myself just now, but I can see the advantages of being able to check your email from older machines/handheld devices that dont have a decent browser. Also, you're wasting a lot less bandwidth if you're downloading just the plain text of your email, and not all the extra HTML gubbins.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[onegear]

couldn't have said it any better...... :-) i'm in no way knocking gmail. i actually have an account. i don't use it much but i do have an account. pine, on the other hand, has been my client of choice for, roughly, 5 years.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[VxJasonxV]

I was thinking the same thing. Even kexec has to stop everything, and thusly, restart the uptime counter.
But hell if he has that feature built in... seeing as it didn't exist in the kernel until, uhhh, 2.6.14 ?

He's still on 2.4, for sure.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[laketrout]

While I don't see anything wrong with your reasons for using pine over gmail, both have their pluses and minuses and it's really up to the user's preference, I do find it ironic that you have no trouble using flickr for hosting photos when you could have hosted the photo on your own server. Any reason you have for using flickr is certainly similar to the reasons others have for using gmail.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[z0idberg]

So all you need is a Linux box (or equivalent) with RAID setup with 100% uptime, UPS, backups to separate machine (RAID and UPS as well - of course!), constant net-connection from home, USB stick with putty on your person at all times or local privelidges on the device/PC you are using to download and install it...and all you have to pay is the intial setup costs for the hardware and the ongoing cost of powering the machines and replacing any hardware that fails.

when you put it like that I dont know why anyone bothers with gmail at all! :-D

(by the way are you backing up off-site as well?)

I tip my hat to you, you have about a million times more knowledge and patience than I do in getting that all setup and working (and doing so was probably half the fun for you), but I couldnt justify the trouble and cost just so I dont get a few text ads and the possible privacy issues of the big G knowing more about me.

Personally I couldnt give a stuff if they read all my emails, I get bored reading them, I cant imagine they are any more interesting to them, and I trust Google more with any bank info or whatever that is in my emails than I do any number of e-commerce sites I give my credit card info. For me Gmail is free, available 100% of the time I have ever checked it and I dont have to worry about backups or storage or anything, sure they could take it away any time but I think it is safe to assume it wont happen anytime soon and when it eventually does we will get plenty of warning beforehand.

I would love to RTFA but it has melted down, I hope it isnt hosted in the same place as someones PINE based email, because I dont think they will be able to check their email for a while.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[op00to]

Be careful, the pRNG that pssh uses is inherently insecure...

Re:One Point For Gmail

[esachse]

1. Right now I have 2.7GB storage on GMail.
Right now, I have 200+ GB of storage available to Pine. Not that I'll ever need it, but it is there.
a) But I need that 2.7 GB for all my pr0n :)

2. I don't need a client with GMail.
I don't need a client with Pine -- Pine is the client, and it runs on my home machine, no matter where I access it from. Which reduces the client-side needs considerably. All I need is a shell of a few K in any computer system. You, on the other hand, require a multi-megabyte browser that supports client-side operations.
b) My home PC is powered by a hamster running on a treadmill - very eco-friendly. Unfortunately, every now and then a hamster has a stroke, and the PC turns off. I need 24/7 access to email, and I get that through Gmail.

3. I can access my GMail from home.
I can access Pine from home
c) I can access either unless the hampster has a stroke.

4. I can access my GMail from work.
I can access Pine from work.
d) No hampster powered PC's at work, so I can access Gmail all the time

5. I can access my GMail from my phone.
I can access Pine from my phone. And my PSP. And my Palm. And my old Amiga. And my Mac. My old 64k OS9/6809 system. And my various other old systems that don't support Java and other client-side technologies. And any *nix system on the planet. I look forward to being able to check my email from my PS3, when they finally get it out the door. All I need is a telnet or (preferably) secure shell, and as they're saying it is linux based.... done deal, probably. I have a dial-up connection on my linux machine that allows me to log in from the oldest, lamest modem I am ever likely to run into. And yes, from there... I can run Pine.
d) I do not have that many friends sending email to me. :( I do not need to see email on my electronic computerized toilet imported from Japan. Besides, I do not like to be disturbed while I take a "most honorable dump".

6. GMail is yet to allow a piece of spam into my inbox.
Pine can take advantage of all manner of cool and innovative spam filters and other kinds of filters. Bayesian, white/blacklist based, custom, you name it. There's no spam in my Pine mailbox at all. Also, there are no ads. You, on the other hand, have Google providing ad content all the time you use GMail. Which is not a lot different from constantly being spammed, at least, to me.
e) Most of the spam I get is for pr0n, and I like it. So does the current hampster; that must be the reason why all thost hampsters are having strokes :-0

Re:One Point For Gmail

[anthony_dipierro]

You are allowing Google to both hold your messages (privacy may become an issue at some point) and you rely on them to stay available to you -- they could decide to drop GMail at any time, or the servers could crash, etc.

Privacy and SMTP don't mix. Anything transmitted via email should be presumed public knowledge. Sure, you can use encryption, but a) who actually does that? and b) you could do that through gmail as well (slightly more of a pain, but considering the first point it isn't going to come up that often anyway).

As for your second point, sure, you're relying on gmail to stay available, as opposed to relying on your ISP/computer/etc to be available. Now for some people (apparently including you, that equation is going to come out with Google being less reliable, but I'd venture a guess that you're in the minority there). As for Google "deciding to drop GMail at any time", I think the chances they'd do that without any warning are essentially zero, but personally I automatically forward every single GMail message I get to my own personal backup system. And since I use my own domain name to forward messages to gmail, I wouldn't have to change my email address either. In the utterly unlikely event that gmail shut down without any warning right now, I'd be back up within 24 hours and would lose at the very most one day of email (assuming gmail accepted the messages and dropped them rather than bouncing them so they get resent).

Re:One Point For Gmail

[GigsVT]

I've even got (very slow) SSH access via encapsulated packet radio (I'm a ham radio person, callsign is AA7AS) from my car and boat if I'm anywhere the hams have packet stuff running.

You know that's illegal right? Encryption is not to be used on ham radio.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

and? Even if there are 400000 local root exploits, someone still needs access.

Mind you if he's using telnet maybe that will happen :P but since he's carrying putty like it's an epi-pen, he'll likely have SSH access.

Uptime isn't a bad thing.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[scumbaguk]

Anyone want to help me redesign the wheel?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[scumbaguk]

Is getting fired for circum-navigating your IT security policy really worth it though?
After all you are supposed to be doing work.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[dajak]

That's not all. You are allowing Google to both hold your messages (privacy may become an issue at some point) and you rely on them to stay available to you -- they could decide to drop GMail at any time, or the servers could crash, etc. If you use Pine, you have complete control: You are storing your own data, you can implement any backup technology that satisfies your need for security and data retention, there are no extra privacy issues to speak of, the goverment can't get your private messages with a general legal attack on Google.

Regarding privacy: surely Google has deeper pockets and better lawyers than you do? Is your private information really safer at home, considering that the police or a burglar can carry the computer away? Why have years of emails available online in the first place? Isn't it better to just download your email with pop and store it offline?

I use imap, thunderbird, pine (for SSH), and squirrelmail (for web) myself. I seriously doubt it helps to protect my privacy.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Jon Luckey]

Ah. I see. It seems that the general thrust of the replies to my comment regarding "It can be used anywhere, without needing to install anything" is that I install something.

Point proven, it seems.

BTW, as recently as the Debian Woody release, ssl in lynx was supported by the lynx-ssl package. lynx-ssl was not in the standard US release. You had to obtain it from a non-US source. Everyone running standard U.S. version debian/woody did not have ssl in lynx.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[timster]

I'm using the "lynx-ssl" package from Debian.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[EugeneDog]

...(this is a redhat 9 machine, no uncontrolled reboots, restarts, or failures, powered by a 1500 watt 100% online [sinewave] UPS.) Backup is every evening to a separate machine done via cron controlled copy, then archive and copy. If the main server fails, I can log into the backup machine. It's been up less time because I stuck a sound card in it (cheap Dell server -- no sound) and had to turn it off to do so. Just 403 days. So as you can see, I don't much worry about my mail system going down when I go out of town. :-)

either way I'm betting Google is more reliable.

I bet they're not. My arrangement has been rock solid

I've been that route: run everything myself. Sure it has it's good points, like you indicate, but I decided it's just too much of a headache (as someone else also just pointed out).

I think the best of both worlds is GMail along with Thunderbird. If Google were to pull the GMail rug out from under me I have Thunderbird as a back-up, local copy of all my email (and it also houses some email I don't do via GMail). So I'm on GMail every day and maybe once a week fire up Thunderbird and all my GMail (and other email) gets pulled down locally to my RAID 0 SATA drives. I think that my basement would flood (hence destroying all my servers) before Google and/or GMail were to go under.

Just one way to manage email.

It has also been argued that if you have a system running on the order of a year or even many months then you have not been diligent in applying security patches (and other patches). I run FreeBSD on most of my servers and could have uptimes of a year or two but then the systems wouldn't be secure. An uptime of 403 days is nothing to brag about, IMO.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[shellbeach]

I don't need a client with Pine -- Pine is the client, and it runs on my home machine, no matter where I access it from.

However, you do need to have your home box running 24/7 and pay for a domain name, which is wasteful at best. And typing an email over a slow ssh/telnet connection seriously sucks ...

Personally, I was a PINE junkie until I started using Gmail. One of things I immediately liked about it was the fact that I could operate the interface by the keyboard alone, just like PINE. Both are great email clients ... :)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[blakestah]

GMail is yet to allow a piece of spam into my inbox.
Pine can take advantage of all manner of cool and innovative spam filters and other kinds of filters. Bayesian, white/blacklist based, custom, you name it. There's no spam in my Pine mailbox at all. Also, there are no ads. You, on the other hand, have Google providing ad content all the time you use GMail. Which is not a lot different from constantly being spammed, at least, to me.

The thing is, GMail has much more effective Bayesian filtering.

They don't only use YOUR choices for spam filtering. They use everybody else's, too. They can tell if thousands of people received the same, or largely the same, message in the same day, and know if it is spam much more effectively as a result. Basically, PINE can use mail filtering tailored for your preferences. GMail can use mail filtering tailored for your preferences, and additionally use information from other users. Spam is typically sent out massively in parallel, GMail can see that, and PINE cannot.

I tried everything I could for my email filtering. It was bad. Then I forwarded the email to my GMail account. Got some spam at first, it now has trickled to 1-2 messages per day, and 50 or so messages that get sent to my spambox per day. GMail spam filtering is MUCH better.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[shellbeach]

I would love to RTFA but it has melted down, I hope it isnt hosted in the same place as someones PINE based email, because I dont think they will be able to check their email for a while.

*grin* ... you really should have been modded up more. Great post! :)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[sznupi]

@Labels - don't assume what you experience is instinct. I don't think that those are tow different mails, ever.

BTW, if you haven't logged into your Yahoo mail account for few years then it's most probably gone :p

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Malc]

Haven't there been security holes found in the kernel in the last 18 mos? With that in mind, such a big uptime is not impressive at all - it just speaks of foolishness.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[sznupi]

Nice hardware you have there...but it gives argument in favor of Gmail. That Dell server is overall quite expensive compared to Gmail account (yes, I'm sure you're using in many other ways tha email...but this is about email)

Also I bet Gmail is more rock solid...read a bit about how they implement data safety (they have several thousands of servers...and they die all the time, permanently - but Google has taken this into account)

No SSH - big problem. Cafe at my department at Uni has totally locked down machines - you can't even run "alien" executables.

Cost of nadwith is really irrelevant in case of email...but you're kidding yourself badly if you put probability of Gmail connection going down on par with yours.

I also have all my email at Gmail - forwarded. And it seems it will be more elegant way of doing this - "import old emails" is on the voting (I guess it's only a matter of priority) on Gmail suggest page.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[MBGMorden]

I don't know about webpine, but my system works very well.

I use fetchmail on my home Linux machine to retrieve messages from two POP3 mail servers. It then does virus & spam filtering using a combination of Postfix, amavisd-new, Spamassassin, and ClamAV. This anti-spam solution is as good as any I've seen (hasn't let a single spam in for months, though I did have to train it at first, this was just a matter of dragging spams to my Spam folder though. A cron script comes by, trains on it nightly, and then cleans it out).

Messages are then sorted by procmail based on various criteria and placed into appropriate maildir mailboxes.

Dovecot runs on the machine as an IMAP server, and I have Roundcube Webmail as well as MailZu (a quarantine management system) installed and running on Apache.

I then use Dyndns.org to keep a domain name that always points to my computer.

With this system:
            - My mails stay on MY equipment, so I've got roughly 80gb of email storage (I do weekly backups to CD)
            - I can access them from any web browser (haven't tried a phone web browser, but if it's compliant it should work)
            - I can access my mail even from a system without a web browser if it has SSH, thanks to Mutt :)
            - When I get back home, I can fire off Thunderbird and have a real email client to work with rather than working with a clunky webmail interface where it's not necessary. Since it's acting as an IMAP client, this also has the benefit that I can check my mail with Thunderbird or any other IMAP client from any computer in the house, and the same messages are always there.

Now admittedly, this is a bit more complex to get working than just signing up for Gmail, but it's a far more robust system in the end, and if you're willing to take 3 or 4 hours out of a Saturday you can have it up and going (mine

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Illbay]

I look forward to being able to check my email from my PS3...

Here, in one short clause, is the most pithy statement of modern geekdom I think I have ever seen.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[feiming]

I wonder whether the fellow hosted his pine at the same server he posted his article. If yes,he might realize that he can't access he email,after /. effect. poor guy...should have use gmail

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Things get even better when you throw IMAP into the mix. With IMAP, not only can I run a CLI mail client like Pine or Mutt to access my mail, I can use any desktop client that supports IMAP, and also any webmail client that supports IMAP. I can use filters on the server side (procmail, bayesian spam filtering, etc).

A lot of people responding to you mentioned the issue of maintaining reliable servers. That's what hosting providers are for. Many will even setup IMAP w/ webmail and spam filtering for you. If you don't trust their backups, do a backup to your local machine.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Nadwidth.... nice... I have a lot of nadwidth

Re:One Point For Gmail

[kcsmith]

> I don't need a client with Pine -- Pine is the client, and it runs on my home machine, no matter where I access it from. > Which reduces the client-side needs considerably. All I need is a shell of a few K in any computer system. You, on the > other hand, require a multi-megabyte browser that supports client-side operations. Last time I checked, lynx was pretty lightweight. I have checked my GMail account a few times from lynx, and it worked fine.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[raju1kabir]

Is getting fired for circum-navigating your IT security policy really worth it though? After all you are supposed to be doing work.

Dunno, at our office (where I rarely am) we are expected to use adult judgment to determine what tools we need to in order to get our work done effectively.

It's only at other outfits' offices I have to deal with the silly restrictions. Without SSH I'm not much use to anyone, so it's tolerated.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[pyser]

The version of Pine I am familiar with doesn't do HTML for crap, can't embed images, doesn't do formatting and so on.

This is actually one of its advantages. No image rendering means none of those nasty image tags to provide silent feedback to the spammer^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsender. And if I need to see an attachment, I save it to my public_html directory and pull it up using a web browser.

Best feature yet: No mouse needed...my fingers never leave my hands!

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

"No SSH - big problem."

Not so big a problem. Use a Java-based SSH client like MindTerm that runs right out of the browser.

"...but you're kidding yourself badly if you put probability of Gmail connection going down on par with yours."

Almost certainly true in a technical sense...no matter how good his single computer is, Google's got redundancy across thousands of computers in multiple locations. I'm not sure if any of the major webmail services have ever had a major outage, DDOS, or attracting undue amounts of attention from people wanting to break the system. I don't recall hearing of any cases. The biggest possible failure for the system is economic/legal, if the business were to fail or if the government were to make some significant judgment or subpoena against Google - not that I think this is likely to happen.

There's also the slight issue that gmail appears to track the content of your letters over time. I don't necessarily having a problem with an ISP's computer automatically reading a message to check for spam or viruses, but that doesn't involve remembering anything about the contents. It's not a big issue, but it is still a little disconcerting.

One thing people don't seem to address here is that you'll probably want to use email service related to your organization, if it has one. I'm at a university, and it makes the most sense to use the university account (pine, IMAP client, or webmail) since that's where I tend to receive email. The university address book is accessible from the client, so you can check addresses before you send mail.

It's nice to know there's a decent webmail alternative out there, though, in case I need to find a service in the future. Now if only Google offered free shell access - "Looking for grep? Find Grep on eBay now!"

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Slaps parent around for lame misuse of an expression

Re:One Point For Gmail

[geekpolitico]

I can access Pine from my phone. And my PSP. And my Palm. And my old Amiga. And my Mac. My old 64k OS9/6809 system.

If a method of communication's utility were determined by the lowest level of technology it can be used with, I'd be praising smoke signals.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[jonored]

Just a point, but I've heard people complaining about GMail returning "service temporarily unavailable" messages six or seven times this year alone. GMail doesn't have bullet-proof stability.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[djrosen]

You can use Mutt and Postfix to read gmail and now you have offline storage as well as all your mail locally if you so choose.

It may not be the be all end all, but it is a great resource and with POP3 and forwarding capabilities I dont see why anyone would not have a gmail account for any non sensitive material.

http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/postfix_tutorial .html

Re:One Point For Gmail

[BarkLouder]

I just logged into your GMail account from my shell using Lynx. What am I saying?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[xpulsar87x]

Surely you see the difference between him SSHing home, which is one person using a connection, and having a ton of people request a file from his connection versus some service's connection (flickr in this case). Email is personal, sharing pictures is public.. it's a bandwidth thing, not a question of where it comes from.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[drsquare]

I don't need a client with Pine -- Pine is the client, and it runs on my home machine, no matter where I access it from. Which reduces the client-side needs considerably. All I need is a shell of a few K in any computer system.

Shell? What computer gives you a shell, much less an ssh client? I can access gmail from any internet cafe or library I want, I doubt many of those have ssh.

You, on the other hand, require a multi-megabyte browser that supports client-side operations.

And of course those are so rare. Last time I was on the Internet at a library, there was no browser to be found, just ssh clients... Multi-megabyte? God no, how will that fit on my 500kb hard disk?

Pine can take advantage of all manner of cool and innovative spam filters and other kinds of filters.

Is it automatically configured and enabled as soon as you start it, without you even having to know about it? If not, then it's not as good as gmail.

I notice you've conveniently forgotten to mention needing a computer which is turned on 24/7, an Internet connection which is on 24/7, plus needing to configure the whole lot, i.e. install a mail server, configure the mail server, install sshd, configure sshd, fuck about with iptables so you can get to your mail but hackers can't get in etc etc etc etc.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Espinas217]

Just take a look at this
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,392581 70,00.htm

Made me think again about my trust in my gmail account. I'll be making a backup as soon as I can of all my email in there

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

... and a long time without a kernel security update :-)

This is true. However, the only port open in the firewall to these two machines is SSH, and I've really not been worried about it. They're on their own pair of static IPs. Do you think I should be worried? Watching the publicly exposed servers, all the attacks seem to come after the web server (and most of those seem to think it's a windows machine, which is kind of funny to watch.) There are various types of nasties in the email that gets filtered, but it never gets to a client (and I suppose an interesting question is, is anyone writing viri to attack Pine?), just dropped by the filters, so I've not worried about that, either. Think I've been too much of an optimist? I mean, so far, so good, but better to get paranoid before a problem than after...

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

Actually, it's not a bandwidth issue as the other poster surmised, it's just a public space where I keep an account for random pics of no particular import to share. I don't have anything like that set up anywhere else. This is quite different, to me, as compared to email. My email contains a detailed history of whats been going on for the last 21 years or so. So I'm considerably more careful with it.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

when you put it like that I dont know why anyone bothers with gmail at all! :-D

As I said in my other posts, I'm not saying this is what anyone else should do. I'm just pointing out some of what you *can* do and what some of the compromises are. In my situation, the servers had to be there anyway (they do other stuff for us, but only on our LAN), they had to be running all the time anyway, and so there was no particular downside to making them my mail-bitches, as it were. :-)

by the way are you backing up off-site as well?

Yes. The company has a once-a-month evolution where we back up all our customer registration data, financial data, email, source code and our various documents to optical media and drop them into a safety deposit box at the bank. We keep the last 12 months there. Older stuff comes out and goes into a warehouse.

There is a window of vulnerability from a catastrophe, but it's not all that wide — we can live with it, I think. The biggest risks here are lightning, fire, and tornados. For lightning, we've done what we can. For fire, we're good. For tornados, the computer center is brick and concrete, but I'm not going to say that's enough. I've seen what a big one can do firsthand. However, if we get hit hard enough to damage that building, there probably won't *be* any of the other buildings left, and so our short term data loss won't seem like much in comparison to the rest of the pushups we'd have to do to get back on our feet.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[stephenbooth]

I use Gmail through a slow dial up from home (typically 30kbps but goes as low as 20kbps and I quite often am checking my mail whilst something is downloading so the bandwidth is shared with other processes) and haven't noticed any particular speed problems. If anything it's a lot faster than Yahoo! mail or anything else of that ilk.

I don't have any issues with the text ads, I don't tend to notice them unless an ad happens to catch my eye because it's relevant to something I'm thinking about. I get very little spam to my Gmail account, maybe 2 actual spams a day (I have my Bigfoot4Life address redirected to my gmail address, prior to that I was getting 100+ spam mails a day to that address, Gmail now filters them out).

Stephen

Re:One Point For Gmail

[mooseballs]

MS Exchange, baby! For physical fitness, you should haul a laptop with you wherever you go. And my Novation CAT MODEM won't accept just any square telephone headset - I also carry a red telephone with the round speaker and pickup, too.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

You know that's illegal right? Encryption is not to be used on ham radio.

If you're a ham, FYI, Part 15 and part 97 rules are in flux, there is a proposed notice of rulemaking.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

However, you do need to have your home box running 24/7 and pay for a domain name

No, you don't need a domain name, you just need an IP. On the other hand, if you've already got a domain name, you can certainly use it. :-)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[larytet]

...on top of it - i started a new porject (GPL, of course) which allows to access PC at home from any inernet enabled device or just using SMS and all this without openning any port in NAT. check this out http://larytet.sourceforge.net/goMyPlace.shtml

this is still more or less non-exisitng with only localhost demo, but we make quick progress on the server side. this solution will allow to access text and HTML based services at about zero bandwidth and about zero RAM and CPU requirements. and yes, End-to-End encryption and "no Java" option.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa, your electric bill must be pretty high.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[cayenne8]

"I can access Pine from my phone."

Very interesting post...but, can you elaborate how you do this with your phone? You have a phone you can ssh or telnet into your box with?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[GigsVT]

Ah, thanks for the update. Looks like it's still illegal for now though. Has there been any FCC action since that ARRL recommendation came out (2004?).

It's kinda funny they played the 9/11 and HIPAA card. Like someone is going to get in trouble for violating HIPAA by relaying the injuries someone has at an emergency scene. :)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[RESPAWN]

I'm currently using a whopping 45 megs of space on my GMail account (this includes about 400 e-mails from particular mailing lists I subscribe to).

While, I might be slightly above normal, I'm using over 600 MB of my Gmail quota. The one thing that Gmail has done for my friends and I is that its generous quota along with a large (10 MB) file size limit allows my friends and I to better pass around media files (Dave Chappelle skits, etc.)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[sznupi]

There's only MS Java there. Furthermore...where would the client be hosted? Why would I trust the one who hosts it? It's such "below radar" service that I have to trust them much, much less than Google...so I would have to host it myself. Which defeats the purpose altogether.

If the service ever fails...so what? With POP3 acces provided there isn't any problem with loosing mail (besides...we're talking about Google here. No small player. Even in unconceivable case of Google going down, their service is too big to not continue, bought by some other big player)

As for tracking...as I said, if you want privacy, encrypt, or better - don't use email.

BTW I also have account at Uni. If anybody would use it to inform us of anything (yeah, sad...) I would probably forward it to Gmail...

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, so *you* guys are the Nerds in "News for Nerds". It all makes sense now...

Re:One Point For Gmail

[mooncaine]

Good points, somersault and chrj.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

Has there been any FCC action since that ARRL recommendation came out (2004?).

There's no sign of movement from them yet, though they pretty much have to respond eventually. If I understand the process correctly. Perhaps we simply need a wardfrobe malfunction.

Like someone is going to get in trouble for violating HIPAA by relaying the injuries someone has at an emergency scene. :)

Exactly. I don't think the FCC has lifted a significant finger at well-intentioned ARO operations in decades. Nor should they, IMHO.

A few years back, I invented an SSTV mechanism (AVT) that used a specialized digital header over any AFSK capable audio channel for both synch and mode setting purposes. It got all over the HF SSTV slices in short order because it was a good deal more reliable and recoverable than the pure analog modes then in use. Technically, this was crossing a line or two. No reaction at all from anyone. Well, it's in the ARRL handbook now, but other than that, no reaction.

Some of the hams around here have extended the coverage on VHF units and from time to time, you can hear them briefly (and typically, anonymously) tag the local highway patrol dispatcher to let them know there's an emergency (Montana is still very rural.. we're 300 miles from the nearest actual city in Montana where I am.) Anyway, no one complains, least of all people dragged in from dead snowmobiles or out from under a horse. But not the authorities, either. Used to happen a lot, less now that we've finally got a bare minimum of cell coverage.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[fyngyrz]

...can you elaborate how you do this with your phone? You have a phone you can ssh or telnet into your box with?

Nokia 6600 + Mocha

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Amadio]

Hey! You guys are forgetting Mutt :-)

Re:One Point For Gmail

[gyepi]

2. You still need a telnet client. Since most people don't use them there's a fair chance that some locked-down PC you try to use will let you use a web browser, but not the command line/telnet.

It the worst case, you can always use the web-based http://www.mail2web.com/ to retreive your emails from the server.

I also faced the same choice between Gmail and Pine. I stayed with Pine for an extra 6 months. Then the only reason why I switched was that I got pissed off when with an unfortunate keystroke I accidentaly erased my sent-mail folder on the linux server (6 years of sent emails are gone). Yes, this is an argument from stupidity, but sometimes it counts.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding running a GUI browser in 64k of RAM, I can think of at least one that will run on a non-SuperCPU accelerated C64. Check out the Contiki OS. But using Contiki's SSH would be my first choice... While a 25-year-old computer logging into a UNIX shell account doesn't have the uber-geek cachet of your system, it is possible. Since you obviously aren't concerned with the average users' experience/hardware, why not go this route? What better way to peruse all that old Compuserve mail?

Re:One Point For Gmail

[aonaran]

Show me a computer that connects to the net that doesn't have a telnet client.

I know there are a few, but for every one of those there's probably at least one whithout web access, or with web access too resricted to use gmail.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[roqetman]

You forget one thing; if Google decides to delete your account, then it can, and there's not much you can do about it. Your own email on your own machine is far safer. I use Gmail too, but I forward anything important to me to one of my regular email accounts, from where incidentally, I collect email using Pine.

Re:One Point For Gmail

[EugeneDog]

Correct. No software does.

GooglePages

[Nos.]

Perhaps google pages would have been a better hosting choice for a story that appears on slashdot. I can't even load the page.

Re:GooglePages

[anonicon]

Beat me to it, but yeah. Of course, I haven't heard when Google's hosting service is going to be opened up to the public from its currently closed beta testing.

Re:GooglePages

[Anonymous Coward]

He's using a 100% Java server. That way he need not worry that the programmers who wrote the server were too inept to do memory management and too careless to prevent out-of-bounds checks, because the language guarantees it! Plus he'll be able to move the server to any other hardware with a compatible java machine without recompiling!

And that's what you want most from your server, right? Rapid implementation and easy redeployment!

Only one way to resolve this...

[AKAImBatman]

...GoogleFight!

GMail Email Client: 5,100,000 results
Pine Email Client: 2,080,000 results

Sorry dude. The unwashed masses have spoken. Time to upgrade!

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[gmletzkojr]

I don't know how accurate that whole googlefight thing is. Did you see this one?
Google Fight

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[rayzat]

Using this logic GMail should be disposed of for Yahoo, which had about 6x the number of results.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[Chacham]

You think *that's* bad.... http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&wo rd1=emacs&word2=vi

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that bad? It's close enough to the truth, vi is more than 20 times better than emacs. For an estimate of the sheer goodness of vi, (and for that matter, ed) just look at the filesizes:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970 /usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs

with apologies to whoever created this.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[crossmr]

Why does this page suck?
It won't even load past "The winner is..." in mozilla, and in IE, it just displays 0 results for both terms.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail is not a client. Therefore, if you remove the search terms "Email Client" from the query, it would probably far surpass Pine.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[odie_q]

No, no. You are unscientific! Pine is clearly the best client, as this comparison shows:
Best email client

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[kesuki]

Well the problem here is you're using the roman numeral for 6 VI which is in the titles of many popular movies, etc etc. etc. then again Imacs get called emacs by some clueless newbies too, and once you narrow it to 'emacs text editor' or 'vi text editor' vi still comes out on top, but only by a 4-5 fold margin. much more realistic than a '20 fold' greater popularity.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[AuMatar]

*You* assume its due to popularity. I assume that its due to vi's interface requiring 4-5 times the tech support and having 4-5 times the hate pages.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[ben0207]

"then again Imacs get called emacs by some clueless newbies too"

http://www.apple.com/education/emac/

I think it is you that is clueless, my friend. Not them.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[Doc Squidly]

I think its almosted /.-ed.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pine Wins!

Gmail: 138,000,000 results
Pine: 141,000,000 results

Heh.. the word I have to type below in the obfuscated image to post this is "rebuttal"

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but Gmail v. Pine (minus the email client bits) has Pine on top!
And Gmail v. Outlook (or Outlook express) shows Gmail getting spanked!

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[uvajed_ekil]

GMail Email Client: 5,100,000 results Pine Email Client: 2,080,000 results

And when you divide users by the number of years the client has been freely available you get an even nigger advantage for GMail. Clearly it is gaining users at a much faster rate, though if I had to guess whether Pine was gaining users at all I'd say no.

The real difference is that GMail is accessible for almost anyone, and is a reasonably competent client/interface, while most people don't have the OS, let alone the knowledge, to run Pine. Your 80286 or Atari mut prefer Pine, but who really uses one of those on a regular basis as their only means of exchanging email? I can use GMail even from my companies crappy, old-ass point-of-sale machines, if I don't mind being without a real keyboard, no telnet required.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[rollomatto]

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&wo rd1=google&word2=microsoft

2.47 billion to 1.76 billion

So microsoft over google too?

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[raju1kabir]

an even nigger advantage

Is this some new street slang I'm not down with?

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[Anonymous Coward]

And when you divide users by the number of years the client has been freely available you get an even nigger advantage for GMail. That's exactly what I'd call it, too.

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[Anonymous Coward]

(peewee) Gmail client vs Outlook client
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&wo rd1=GMail+Email+Client&word2=Outlook+Client

So?

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[uvajed_ekil]

an even nigger advantage Is this some new street slang I'm not down with?

Oh dear...it seems my computer has been taken over by the Whitey.KKK virus, which distorts text with white supremacist-redneck typos. My sincere apologies. (And the "b" and "n" keys are next to each other on my keyboard, which doesn't help!)

Re:Only one way to resolve this...

[kesuki]

and i could have checked for that too, nice catch.

I still know somewhere out there someone called an imac and emac, not knowing the difference.

I like gmail.

[yagu]

Here's why I use gmail (over PINE):

• web based, can get to it from any browser anywhere
• indexed by Google for me! I'd venture a guess that if you had a gigabyte of e-mail to search from pine, and you did searches all of the time, you'd not find PINE even capable of achieving the "within one magnitude" result you found.
• search is implemented as in Google, i.e., you can enter keywords in any order, any case, etc., and Google pretty much knows what to do. (some may not realize but Google even has nuance in what is returned in what order based on the order keywords are entered -- while still managing to preserve meaningful and complete results)
• when there are new and wonderful features (there sometimes are) they're their without having to install our update.
• html/graphics and multimedia capabilities. While I haven't used PINE in a long time, last time I did, mime was almost an add-on, and a bit gnarly to use.
• gmail is nicely folded into my browser interface experience. When I send e-mail from Windows, the e-mail is instantiated in a new tab that automatically disappears when the transaction is completed.
• gmail auto-saves drafts for me - I've been saved by this a couple of times.
• keyboard shortcuts (I know the author complains about the inconsistent overloading, but I've found them comfortable and decent especially for being implemented in a browser... maybe a "vi" background is handy after all!)
• gmail keeps all of my data handy, indexed, and available for that future day someone wants to subpoena my records! (kidding)

Also, this is a comparison of a completely integrated package (gmail) with a Mail User Agent (MUA). I think for my purposes I enjoy finally letting someone else manage all of the pieces for me. I still have my personal favorite MUA for transferring all of my gmail to local storage and archive (just in case something goes terribly wrong) but so far I think gmail is a great piece of work.

Re:I like gmail.

[networkBoy]

In exchange you give Google access to your e-mail if at least for ads, and in addition to had over upon subpoena.
Don't take it wrong, I use google for the same reasons you do.
-nB

Re:I like gmail.

[lazlo]

I like gmail too, but one thing that really bugs me is that, in my experience, search is fairly anemic too. I'm pretty well certain regexes can't be used, and I don't find that too surprising. But even worse, I don't think that wildcards can be used either, and even worse than that, it seems that substrings can't be used either. As an example, I needed to find a message that I had recieved from citibank. Or maybe it was citifinancial. Perhaps citimortgage. But definitely one of the citigroup companies. So I searched for "citi". There were no results. I eventually found the message by having firefox do a text search on each page of headers for the string "citi". Fortunately, that was in the subject of the message.

Maybe there's something I don't know about searching gmail, but at the least, it certainly doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me.

Re:I like gmail.

[gmuslera]

Is both a pro and a con, but...

• Integration with other (actual and future) google services

... is a BIG factor. You already have there web search, gtalk, maps, rss, etc, and probably could have much more (i.e. is a calendar on closed beta already). And is just not there as side decoration, i.e. you can manage your past chat conversations as mail messages. Pine could be a great mail client, but gmail can be for you far more than just that.

Re:I like gmail.

[x2A]

"addition to had over upon subpoena"

Yeah but really, how many of us is this going to happen to?

Re:I like gmail.

[networkBoy]

s/had/handing/

I for one see it as a real possibility should I cross the line beyond repairing bricked consoles and started offering hacked software.
-nB

Re:I like gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're there, idiot.

Re:I like gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could search for "Citigroup" not the results you're looking for? "Citifinancial"...you get the point.

at the very least, it seems easier than clicking "next page" then searching, "next page" search, "next page" search...how many citis could it be from?

Or you could just label your e-mails as they come in, before archiving. I label all receipts as "receipts," all bills as "bills," all newsletters as "newsletter" etc. You can even add multiple labels, so you can file it under both "financial" and "receipt" etc. etc.

then when i want to look for something, i just click on the label i know it's under.

Re:I like gmail.

[Dasher42]

Wouldn't mail accounts on any server under US jurisdiction be subject to subpoena? This isn't exactly a Google vs. Pine issue.

Re:I like gmail.

[networkBoy]

Correct, but in this case it's that deleted != DELETED
On a local mail server the user can ensure that deleted mail is overwritten, and even with a traditional ISP POP account messages that are deleted on download alre usually quickly overwritten.
-nB

Re:I like gmail.

[Kadin2048]

Yeah but you can't exactly call up Google and tell them to please "Delete my email, then format the drive it's on 30 times, writing it over each time with zeros, then ones, then a mix of the two, and then dump it in a river."

In theory, if you were using PINE and your own mailserver, you could do that. However if you were just using PINE and connecting to Comcast or any other large ISP, you'd be just as hosed if the guys in suits came knocking with paper.

Re:I like gmail.

[Ruis]

If you're emailing anything incriminating using ANY email server, you're stupid. That's what GPG is for.

Re:I like gmail.

[caffeination]

My Official Question:
Does anybody apart from me completely ignore the "You can keep ALL your email!!" thing, and purge regularly anyway?

Imagine years and years of correspondence, complete with a great search system, and all you have to do to get at it is to log a few key presses.

The 99% of the time that I'm safe behind Linux isn't the high risk time anyway. The risk comes in the half a dozen times a year I'll need to check my email on a Windows box or a public machine.

Re:I like gmail.

[Atzanteol]

html/graphics and multimedia capabilities. While I haven't used PINE in a long time, last time I did, mime was almost an add-on, and a bit gnarly to use.

You consider that a *feature*? Ugh. If mutt can't display it, then it's SPAM.

Re:I like gmail.

[Alaska Jack]

Another big flaw -- gMail doesn't search the contents of attachments. When you think about it, this is a pretty serious consideration if you're thinking about using gMail heavily as your main client.

    - AJ

Re:I like gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

subpoena? Probably none of us. Covert government surveilance? Perhaps all of us, every day. How would we know? Presidents can direct spy agencies to do whatever they like regardless of any law so long as there isn't too much uproar when/if the public finds out, so I'd say all bets are off.

Re:I like gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Better way is to use the OR operator:

citibank|citifinancial|...

An even better way is to type out a phrase or set of words (particular nouns and verbs) you remember from the email. For example if you know the email was dealing with a credit card and credit card was somewhere in the email, searching for "credit card" would actually be a pretty good filter.

Re:I like gmail.

[x2A]

Yep, gmail or not, if "they" really wanna find out what you've been saying, they can. I just don't see them wanting to with me (I say nothing that'd interest them... if you do, bully for you!)

Re:I like gmail.

[JordanL]

I never understood this. Do you think that your e-mail information isn't available to Microsoft if you have hotmail, or Yahoo with Yahoo Mail? Do you think that your data isn't available to ANYONE else unless you run your own mail server?

Re:I like gmail.

[DoraLives]

If you're emailing anything incriminating using ANY email server, you're stupid.

Ah, but will the things that aren't incriminating today always remain so? Therein lies the rub.

Re:I like gmail.

[lazlo]

That is bad. I could almost forgive that one, if the raw ascii strings didn't show up in the binary format. But Google has the "show as HTML" link for many binary formats, so they obviously have the capability to figure out what the raw text is... They're just not using it.

I guess that's why they call it "beta".

Wonder how much of an impact it would make if we (all of slashdot) submitted feature requests for all of these things via google's feedback mechanism.

Re:I like gmail.

[alphakappa]

Your email can be subpoenaed from whichever ISP gives you mail service regardless of which client you use (including Pine). So if you are using your company email or university email or even your own email server, it can be subpoenaed from some source if the govt needs it.

Re:I like gmail.

[Otterley]

Nor can you do it yourself if you've already received a subpoena for your email. Destroying or tampering with evidence subject to court-ordered discovery constitutes contempt and can subject the party to criminal sanctions, including fines and jail time.

Re:I like gmail.

[__aabwba5127]

YOU give Google access to your e-mail if at least for ads, and in addition to had over upon subpoena. And so are you :-)

Re:I like gmail.

[Tyr_7BE]

If I had mod points I'd mod you up. I can't stand that about Gmail. Google is a SEARCH company. You figure that SEARCH would be their first priority. But really, if you don't type the word you're looking for exactly as it appears in the email, you're out of luck.

That, and the fact that you can't download HTML. If you attach an HTML file to an email and email your gmail, it will automatically put it inline. No option to download it to another machine and work on it there.

I like gmail, but there are some pretty serious holes in the interface that the engineers seem to be ignoring.

Re:I like gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please enjoy your incredibly messy future divorce.

Re:I like gmail.

[Khaed]

Yes. It's called ex post facto law. They can't pass a law against something in 2007 and arrest you if they have evidence you're doing it in 2006.

Re:I like gmail.

[asgeo1]

Google Desktop Search doesn't support wildcards or substrings either

Re:I like gmail.

[lazlo]

The suckage in searching from a google product struck me as strange too. I've thought about it some though, and it *might* make sense.

In google's web search, they don't do regexes either. And I understand it. Regexes are expensive, and it's difficult to optimize for an arbitrary regex search. And they don't usually do substring searches either. I'm suspecting that google primarily indexes on whole words. However, their results are eerily accurate. One of the big things that helps this is their spelling suggestions. Often they're wrong, but often they're right too. So why don't they suggest other spellings when I search my mail? My suspicion is that they aren't being as clever as I'd like to think they are. My suspicion is that they aren't using some amazing algorithm to figure out what I meant, instead they're using the much simpler method of a million monkeys at typewriters (that would be us) giving them suggestions as to the types of spelling mistakes that people generally make.

And my suspicion is that that's a lot harder to do for ostensibly private e-mail messages than it is for the large and public corpus they have with the internet at large.

But I could be completely wrong on all points. I just know that they suck at searching e-mail. And if their concept of "archive, don't delete" is going to work well, search has to be better.

Re:I like gmail.

[Simon Garlick]

Tell that to the Nazis at Nuremberg.

Re:I like gmail.

[x2A]

I'm gonna be getting married?! *sniff* that's the best news I've had all day!

Re:I like gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

But can the law retrospectively prosecute?

Re:I like gmail.

[arturs]

Have you ever tried deleting messages that occupy most space in GMail?

Re:I like gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

There really ought to be another tag for comments like this.

(Score: 5, Paranoid)

Re:I like gmail.

[z0idberg]

I would say that if you are sending anything that today isnt incriminating but one day might be then either:

a) it is borderline incriminating and you shouldnt be using any email server for it

or

b) you are sending normal, everyday stuff and you think one day there will be laws against it or you will be strung up for it. If that day ever comes and you avoid the first round of arrests by the secret police by using secure, self hosted email your whole life then good luck to you. You will need as much luck as you can get to avoid getting caught by a "legal" phone tap or any other means other than your emails.

Re:I like gmail.

[spaceturtle]

Or for that matter, the people who decided to be born Jews before that kind of thing was ruled to be an illegal violation of the racially pure state.

Or when being an intellectual was banned because it was counter revolutionary

Or... well any way, I agree that I wouldn't want to rely on that. Particularly not if we ended up with some fucked up totalitarian government. Still use GMail though.

Re:I like gmail.

[u16084]

I must agree. the "email" search is a little weak. Wheres the "Did You mean.....?" For an example, There was an email from ebay .. an invoice... It contained "Invoice" right in the subject line along with "ebay" it was not tagged spam. But anyways I searched "Ebay" with the email being tagged as a result, but searching "Invoice" - resulted with no hits... Google is very powerful when it comes to searches, so why limit it with emails?

Re:I like gmail.

[shellbeach]

in addition to had over upon subpoena.

Whereas your own personal mail server is secure from the police??!! How, exactly?

Re:I like gmail.

[Khaed]

Well, if you're using your Gmail to plan the systematic murder of eleven million or so people...

That case is an exception, not the rule, and that is an extraordinary circumstance.

Re:I like gmail.

[networkBoy]

There have been several people to point to this basic premise.
Your local mail server is less insecure by virtue of the ability to not archive your e-mail.
Google has so much data that e-mail is persistant, even when deleted. Most ISPs and for sure a local mail server (if desired) would not back up the e-mail messages, thus once deleted the disk space is available for overwriting. It is by no means secure, but it is at least one more layer between you and a subpoena.
-nB

Re:I like gmail.

[NivenMK1]

Yes. It's called ex post facto law. They can't pass a law against something in 2007 and arrest you if they have evidence you're doing it in 2006.

Correct, so long as whatever got discovered dosen't get you labeled as a "terrorist" by the parties that be.

I, for one, refuse to subject myself to the posiblity of someday somebody misconstruing something I have written then combining that with anything which may be misconstrued to become evidence to label me in such as fashon as to interrupt my life, however temporarily, for any period of time.

Avoiding the possibility, especially in these days of increasingly wild lawmakers, is assurance in and of itself. Granted running your own solution may be at some points complex, but a little time now to save the potential of a losing a lot of time later is it's own reward.

Re:I like gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bah! Back in my day, we only had 2-bit images. Black and white, on an 80x25 terminal screen! And we liked it! You crazy hippies with your newfangled 16 or more different colors. Why the hell would you want to look at pictures, anyway? I can download ASCII pr0n a lot faster than those stupid color things! And we had to telnet into our mail servers to check our mail, none of these crazy "folder" contraptions. Get off my lawn!"

Grow up, old man.

Re:I like gmail.

[shellbeach]

The problem is that:

a) if the gov't wants to read your email, they ain't gonna knock. You'll get no warning, no chance to delete anything.

b) even if you *do* get the chance to delete or encrypt, it will be considered a criminal offence and evidence of guilt, and you'll probably end up in a lot more trouble than you would have if you'd left your data alone (unless you were up to serious trouble in the first place, but I'm assuming that you're not the type! :)

Re:I like gmail.

[networkBoy]

Generally the thought is that if you have something to hide, don't use e-mail. If by chance something ungood comes in as clear, then you can wipe it before a subpoena is issued, waiting to do so till afterwards is no good.
-nB

Journal Posting

[LiquidCoooled]

I like it :)

Apart from the obviously silly "An anonymous reader writes " at the start of it.
First time I've seen Journals posted, is it a slow news day, or just trying out another new feature?

Re:Journal Posting

[RLiegh]

journal posting + no anonymous + no foes/no friends fos == vastly improved signal to noise ratio.

This is the direction the front page should go. Hell, if taco implements this then maybe, just maybe they can regain the userbase which digg has stolen from them.

Re:Journal Posting

[Pavan_Gupta]

Honestly, I wouldn't say Digg has stolen the userbase -- it's just made a nice copy of it -- and it seems to be grabbing a crowd of people that aren't so enthused with the Digg community, but just the interesting information they have. Honestly, Slashdot needs to post more things at a faster rate -- and I'm sure the users will focus on what they'd like to ..

Re:Journal Posting

[LiquidCoooled]

Ok, something I don't like about all this "digg vs slashdot" war thingy is that whilst digg readership has been increasing to match slashdots (both have increased actually), there has been no reduction in slashdot readers.
People have been using OTHER time to read digg and not abandoning slash.
There is no reason whatsoever for digg to replace slash, they do different jobs and if anything, digg has the fark crowd more than the slash folks.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &compare_sites=digg.com&y=r&q=&url=slashdot.org

Re:Journal Posting

[Otter]

It's been a feature in the Journals for a while, although this is the first time I've seen one posted.

It's actually a good idea, although you're faced with a choice between including an Obligatory Stupid Question at the end of your JE and looking like an idiot to the journal crowd or leaving it out and mostly killing your chances of story acceptance.

I guess in this case, mentioning Google was enough to make up for not closing with "Between Pine and GMail, is Microsoft doomed?"

Re:Journal Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously for a reason...

There's a bunch of changes in the pipeline that will help make slashdot a more "community" website -- tagging, more prominant journals (with front page), a revamped moderation system, enhanced profiles, wikis, etc. digg, blogger, myspace, etc are all the rage these days and slashdot has been stagnant. OSDN is jumping on the bandwagon (finally, this stuff should have been done years ago).

Re:Journal Posting

[lucabrasi999]

People have been using OTHER time to read digg and not abandoning slash.

Actually, I've been using my OTHER time to, you know, work. It doesn't hurt that I'm too lazy to bookmark Digg.

Re:Journal Posting

[LiquidCoooled]

When surfing, I open a block of tabs at a time and flick around between them.
The digg tab replaces about 4 or 5 other random sites and bloggs I had waiting for a quick glimpse at.

I wonder, would slash consider adding an rss digg feed?

Re:Journal Posting

[glockNine]

Here's my take: I read slashdot for the discussion, and digg for the stories. Many times the stories posted on slashdot are a couple days old and seen before, but the discussion is more engaging and infomative then about anywhere else on the internet (I know that's not saying much, I can hear the quiet chuckles already).

The Discussion on Digg, on the other hand, is useless, but the cycle rate of stories is much faster, and there are more stories per day that interest me than slasdot.

Re:Journal Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is the direction the front page should go. Hell, if taco implements this then maybe, just maybe they can regain the userbase which digg has stolen from them."

Digg lasted all of two days in my bookmarks before I decided that it was simply too stupid to continue reading. The story selection is incredibly poor and the comments are among some of the worst I've ever read. In fact, everyone in my office has stopped reading Digg completely. We also voted unanimously to remove the site completely from the morning news aggregator. In a place with hundreds of programmers/engineers a unanimous vote is pretty damn uncommon.

I'm quite happy to see some of Slashdot's readership move over to Digg because in all likelihood these are the exact type of people that don't have anything of value to add to the conversation.

Re:Journal Posting

[bmalia]

I don't know what an "rss digg feed" is, but slashdot already has a RSS feed.

Re:Journal Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no reason whatsoever for digg to replace slash, they do different jobs and if anything, digg has the fark crowd more than the slash folks.

I'm not so sure. I've been using Slashdot for more years than I care to remember. But lately less often, in no small part because of Digg

The reason is a combination of Digg offering a lot of the same news/stories 1-3 days before (if you don't read both you wouldn't believe how many Slashdot stories are being reposted by someone from Digg).

And of the famous "I read Slashdot for the comments" decreasing in value for me by an increasing amount of zealotry and FUD, more and more meaningless noise between fewer and fewer solid comments (especially thanks to fan-based, not fact-based, modding). Slashdot has always been slanted, but we used to be the anti-FUD side, now we are almost the worst.

Digg is no place for solid debate either, but they don't pretend to, some of the comments can be good for a laugh - and at least they get the stories 1-3 days (or even more) before.. I'm still here, but it certainly is increasingly affecting how much I use Slashdot. Just my 2 euro cents..

Re:Journal Posting

[bprime]

there has been no reduction in slashdot readers.

This is totally obvious. It's easy to see that the value of the user IDs here still haven't started decreasing.

:)

Re:Journal Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys had user submitted stories years ago, there is still one in existence. Oh btw can you please do something about Taco crapflooding it? Thanks.

Re:Journal Posting

[McCarrum]

I cannot agree more. I have both running on my second monitor on my desk, and usually comment with content on Slash (on the rare moment when I have an original idea or my specific opinion), but I throw quips into Digg.

I feel about the same

[liliafan]

First I would like to say it is nice to see an employee of a company looking at positive 'and' negative aspects of a product their employeer makes.

Secondly I used to use pine, for several years in fact, until I got turned onto mutt by a friend, it is IMHO way more powerful, and, configurable than pine.

Thirdly after recommendations from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=181673&cid=150 25454'./'s I am experimenting with gmail, and, have been having about the same experience, mostly I am impressed, but I am left with a feeling that it just isn't mature enough yet as a mail client. Don't get me wrong of all the webmail clients I have used this is my favorite, but generally I miss Mutt.

Re:I feel about the same

[LiquidCoooled]

First I would like to say it is nice to see an employee of a company looking at positive 'and' negative aspects of a product their employeer makes.

A good employer will examine and critique their products against the rest of the marketplace.
A better employer allows the results to be made public.

Re:I feel about the same

[ZSpade]

I am impressed, but I am left with a feeling that it just isn't mature enough yet as a mail client.

That's why it's GMail *beta*, and not just GMail
That said, this beta web client is probably the best one I've ever had, mature or not. I mean if it can be compared to Pine, an email client that has been around for *years*, and then pretty much come out on top while still in beta form...

Re:I feel about the same

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get me wrong of all the webmail clients I have used this is my favorite, but generally I miss Mutt.

The beauty of gmail (at kleast from my perspective) is that with its POP access you can use your favourite e-mail client and then when you're out and about you still have your entire e-mail archive there, searchable, available in any web browser and it's still a joy to use.

Re:I feel about the same

[zootm]

I personally just think that it's impressive having a webmail app so highly rated by users of "power" mail clients — for people who'd never use the advanced features that such people love, it's a pretty shining recommendation, in a lot of ways. :)

PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[everphilski]

pine + PortaPuTTY + a thumb drive

It can be used anywhere by just plugging your thumb drive in with the security of SSH. And you get the benefit of no targeted advertizing (And no company aggregating your life's communications...)

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[iotasmall]

Pine is my only email client since day one. When I am away, I ssh into my box for email. I first used TeraTERM+ttssh and switched to PuTTY in the last few years. I always resent the fact PuTTY store configure in registry. PortaPuTTY is the answer for me. Thank you. Chan Tai Man

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[laura20]

I like pine, but that "+ Thumb Drive" is huge caveat. "works anywhere" is not the same as "works anywhere that has a USB port and where I happen to be carrying my drive".

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[TaylorTAP]

If only it was that simple. What happens if the network you plug that thumb drive in doesn't allow executables to be ran from a thumb drive? Or what if on port 80 is unblocked? Your solution would require me to carry something around with me. Gmail doesn't not my friend!

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Nazo-San]

That's not to mention the fact that sometimes you can't actually get to a USB port without pulling out the system and everything, and if they are running a really old system with Windows 98 or something, then you can't just simply plug it in, you require special software, so you'll have to be carrying a driver disc or something too. A few systems can boot from USB (flash drives can be set up with ZIP geometry to fool even more BIOSes into actually working,) but, the smarter people put a password on the BIOS, and you can't go around opening up systems to reset their BIOS... If you have a big problem with such systems, you'll probably be happier running up to a best buy or some other such place and buying a pocket DVD-RW (1.4 hypeGB.) You'll only be able to write to it at home most of the time, but, otherwise, a large number of systems will work. Of course, there are also pocket CD-RWs, but, you're looking at 210MiB there for the same sized disc.

Anyway, most of the systems I would have access to have USB ports right in the open and Windows XP, so I'm set with my little Cruzer Micro on my keychain. I carry a copy of my internet browser configured to use %temp% for temporary files on my flash drive. Then I can just fire it up and connect to gmail/etc. Cookies are stored on the flashdrive, so I don't even have to worry about login information security and such. I do also carry a copy of PuTTY, though I wasn't aware of this "PortaPuTTY" which might maybe handle settings better (I've had to set up a batch file which loads a registry file just before running PuTTY, then loads a registry file set to remove the entries after. I'm not storing any passwords or anything anyway, so no big deal.)

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[McCarrum]

You are going to find more systems with USB than with Internet. Plus the issue of retaining alot more control over your environment. It's one of those issues that will never be a clear cut "winner" or "loser".

Me, I use GMail. I just find it easier. YMMV.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

also, some locations will block imap/pop/smtp in and out - seemingly everything except http and https. ...furthermore, they can check the traffic to make sure it's the correct type for that port number :|

I have this problem with using Thunderbird with Fastmail.fm at a company I've just started working at - a *big* US-based company (though I'm working in their China office) with a paranoid anal IT department.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[jridley]

Not true in the least. Many of my friends work in companies where USB ports are disabled. Some have rules that don't allow executables to run from removable devices.

I wouldn't care to have a visitor to my house run an executable from one of my house computers, but I'd be happy to let them use a web browser. I would be hesitant to ask someone to run an EXE from my own thumb drive; seems rude, but I use a browser on others computers often.

I work in a place where SSH ports are blocked. What if you're visiting someone who has a Mac? At a kiosk in the airport? I'd guess your solution would work in more than half the machines you're likely to get to, but by no means even close to all.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm. You need somewhere with *both* USB and an Internet connection.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats why I have SSHd run on port 443 of my servers aswell, and BTW, ssh is on Macs since OSX. I don't use portaputty though, I just "run from current location" from my HTTPS site.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[ottothecow]

My school has a web based ssh connection stashed somewhere on their website. I think it is set to automatically ssh into the central server on the system (the other linux boxes require a CS account) but from there you can run ssh and connect to anything and run pine there.

Of course, I dont do that....I use thunderbird and squirrelmail if I am on the go.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[drauh]

pine schmine. real geeks use nmh. for an example of why, see: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/book/mh/finpic.htm

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[eean]

It takes two seconds to download putty.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[jridley]

Our company has firewalls that inspect packet contents. They will (and have in the past) detect SSH even running on other ports, and in that case you're in even more trouble for circumvention.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[McCarrum]

DOH! /me cackles quietly to self.

Damn, I got n00b all over myself there ..

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[cdrudge]

And a computer with a USB port but no Internet access is useful for e-mail how?

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[sirwallyc]

I can guarantee that solution wouldn't work at all from our corporate network and I am sure that this is the case far more often than you think. You'd get about as far as the proxy and then be given a virtual finger.

Gmail, on the other hand, works just fine because the proxy doesn't block any HTTPS traffic. It doesn't work via HTTP, however. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, but I don't ask questions in case it's an oversight ;-)

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[L the Cat]

But remember: unless you are running your own mail server *someone* is aggregating your life's communication. Google at least fought tooth and nail against big government's attempt to peek into their data.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[neosake]

How about a web - based ssh client like http://www.appgate.com/products/80_MindTerm/ ? You drop the jar somewhere voilà, instant ssh connection on a browser that has java.

Disclamer: I _dont't_ work for said company, just a very satisfied user.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[jack_csk]

Some companies blocked employees from downloading windows executables.

It may be possible that a company allow network traffic to the file server, yet deny the workstations from accessing the Internet directly. Who knows.

However, if a company goes that far to block http access on workstations, I wonder if the company has no security policy against USB storage device.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Wdomburg]

I go for the best of all worlds personally - have command line clients, IMAP, POP and web mail all available on my mail server. :)

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[GoatPigSheep]

too bad thumb drives aren't free, gmail is, another point of gmail

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[everphilski]

If only it was that simple. What happens if the network you plug that thumb drive in doesn't allow executables to be ran from a thumb drive? Or what if on port 80 is unblocked? Your solution would require me to carry something around with me. Gmail doesn't not my friend!

What if your work blocks webmail access? (I've seen that more often than I have seen USB ports potted, or port 23 blocked, or local executables not being able to be run... combined)

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Thundersnatch]

Umm... how many sane people/organizations would let you run an arbitrary executable from your thumb drive on their computer? No matter what the OS?

We use Microsoft's software restriction policies on all our corporate Windows machines and kiosks to prevent just that sort of thing.

I don't think you'll be able to run arbitrary software from that thumb drive at Kinko's or any reasonably well-run Internet cafe either.

Maybe you can use it at your Mom's house. But it will become increasingly difficult to find other machines from which to run Putty of your USB key.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[daviddennis]

I was on vacation in the Philippines in February and I had to get some work done back home.

In many places, there was no wifi or Internet cafes that let me hook up my Powerbook, so I couldn't use SSH that way.

A quick Google for 'ssh java client' found MindTerm. It worked well enough for me to do the job, although it would occasionally ask me if I wanted to quit out of the blue. It would then hang and I'd have to abort IE/Firefox and start over again.

In a pinch, though, where there were no other options, I sure was grateful for it.

D

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Rekolitus]

HTTPS traffic is un-interceptable, so it is given the benefit of the doubt nearly always.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[localman]

Hell, I'm such a PINE evangalist I'll give out my URL:

        java ssh client

Feel free to copy the HTML and Java to your own server. Then you can ssh/PINE from any web browser. It's like gmail but it's PINE!

Cheers :)

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[raju1kabir]

I work in a place where SSH ports are blocked.

You don't need port 22, you can use any port and tunnel over almost any protocol.

What if you're visiting someone who has a Mac?

Then you can leave your thumbdrive in your pocket, because the Mac already has an SSH client built in.

At a kiosk in the airport?

Then you use a web-based Java SSH client.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[kwark]

The answer would be a http tunnel like http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html (never had to use it though)

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem, the purpose of the thumb drive "PorraPuTTY" version is to store your connection settings on the thumb drive. (for quick click-and-start access to your server from anywhere). -eimlimated is the need to download Putty & set up your settings.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Bert64]

A mac wouldn't be a problem...
Windows is the only os nowadays that still doesn't come with an SSH client by default.
On a mac you could just use the default ssh client shipped with the os.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Bert64]

Microsoft software restriction policies are absoloutely trivial to circumvent, give it a try sometime. It's like putting up a curtain and a sign instead of a proper locked door.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Bert64]

To an extent...
They will check that you negotiate SSL on the HTTPS port, but after that they can't see the traffic you transmit inside the SSL stream. So all you need, is a service that runs over SSL. Simple

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Minutes. You have to be a bloody fast typist using a console text client or a mad clicker (ever thought about lanparties) to fire up a browser, run and download PuTTY. Besides, it takes a while to make the initial connection, and even then you're lucky that all the systems you've used were so fast. Most of the ones I use are far more saturated with traffic and downloads end up not going too much faster than on my ADSL modem at home. PuTTY is small, but, it still takes a bit to download on ADSL.

Keeping a local copy saves a lot more than two seconds just getting it. Plus you totally ignored the time saved to actually configure it. You'll have to give up little personalizations like scrollback lines, text colors, etc and just simply set up the actual connection settings then leave it alone from there if you consistantly do it this way too.

I wonder if anyone sponsers any big PuTTY download and setup races? No? Aw.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[RESPAWN]

That's hardly an all encompassing solution. The company I work for actually blocks port 22 at the firewall. You're also counting on the fact that USB drives will be allowed by the machine's local policies.

Just about any machine with internet access will have a browser on it. Gmail is more convenient.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope you've memorized your fingerprint, or at least carry around a copy of it.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that Pine licensing is a booby trap. Take a look at http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html and http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/legal.html. And notice this from the FAQ:

        'In particular, the earliest Pine licenses included the words: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software... is hereby granted," but some people tried to pervert the meaning of that sentence to define "this software" to include derivative works of "this software". The intent has always been that you can re-distribute the UW distribution, but if you modify it, you have created a derivative work and must ask permission to redistribute it.'

This is, of course, unaccpetable nonsense. The original wording was quite clear, and the university has decided to try and redefine their terms after the fact. I believe the particualr case that upset them was when SSL capability was provided in some distributions, with code not from UWash because they refused to publish their code due to US export encryption regulation concerns. Mark Crispin, the core author of WU-imapd and Pine, went ballistic, and accused the publishers of code theft and copyright violation. (It obviously wasn't code theft, the SSL code was completely different from Wash U's code.)

This licensing problem has led to Pine being dropped from Debian and RedHat and numerous other Linux distrose.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[fritzk3]

What if your work blocks webmail access?

You could find a different place to work, I guess. :) Not ideal, but it may solve the problem you're describing.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[Thundersnatch]

It's certainly not trivial to bypass if you set it up right. Assuming the user isn't a member of the local Administrators group (which they would not be on a public machine) and you use the whitelist functionality of software restrictions to allow only exectuables/DLLs with a certain signature or hash to run (filename and path rules aren't strong enough). See here.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[topher1kenobe]

At a kiosk in the airport?

If you're checking your email at a kiosk at an airport, it doesn't really matter what you use, because putting your passwd into a public kiosk is crazy dumb.

I choose pine because I can ssh to it from anywhere. I've never found anywhere I couldn't ssh from.

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

[jridley]

Then the firewall starts flagging you because you're keeping an SSL connection open for a long time, which is easy to detect and different than normal https surfing, and you get an email asking what the hell you're doing, and would you like to come over and discuss it with management.
Thanks, just using gmail works for me.

Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[RLiegh]

pine isn't even Free Software for pater's sake!

You cannot modify pine and distribute it; you have to make a patch of your changes, and distribute that along with a copy of the source code.

Mutt is superior (as is yahoo mail -except when it comes to pop3 access which is becoming less and less relevent every day)!

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[Anonymous Coward]

Mutt is superior (as is yahoo mail -except when it comes to pop3 access which is becoming less and less relevent every day)!

I'll stick with pop3, thank you. I'd prefer to have my messages on my hard drive, where I and I alone am control of what is archived or deleted, and I and I alone am able to access these archives.

I'm amazed how many people use gmail for essential messanges. What part of "Beta" don't you understand? Yes, it's stable, yes it's reliable so far-- but there is no guarantee that Google won't, say, have an error clearing your account (which could always happen as they implement new features), and more important there is no obligation for Google to restore your information if there is a problem. A free, "Beta" service means they can do whatever they want and customer beware.

Gmail is also far from secure, and protection of your privacy is no guarantee. Do we know what they do with your old messages? That may not make a difference to you now and probably won't for most of you in the future, but you never know when a message from years ago might bite you in the ass (say you or a company you work for is in a legal dispute, which is a possibility for any of us no matter how remote, will Google deny a request to turn over your mail if ordered?)

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[Syberghost]

While what you say about Mutt vs. Pine is true, it's not relevant. It's not like Gmail is Open Source either. Yes, you can use an Open Source web browser to access it, but you can use an Open Source ssh/telnet/whatever client to access Pine.

Your response is more of an anti-Pine troll than a commentary on the article.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[RLiegh]

>Your response is more of an anti-Pine troll than a commentary on the article.

what do yahoo, gmail, mutt and pine all have in common? They are all email solutions, and my comment was addressing the topic of locally-installed and web-based email clients.

Neither yahoo nor gmail are open source, but neither are yahoo nor gmail applications which install locally on your machine either. However, both pine and mutt are locally-installable applications, and that is why I made the comparison between them (as opposed to between pine and gmail, which is about like comparing pumpkins to gym socks IMO). For a Free system (such as Debian GNU/Linux) installing pine isn't even an option unless you add the non-free branch; this is for the reason which I already pointed out.

Therefore, for people who are running a Free Computer, and who wish to use a CLI mail client, mutt is a more viable choice than is pine.

Finally, I'm certainly not above trolling, but my comments in this article have been both sincere representations of my personal opinion and have been stated appropriately. Your accusation of trolling is as inaccurate as it is inflammatory.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[Syberghost]

Finally, I'm certainly not above trolling, but my comments in this article have been both sincere representations of my personal opinion and have been stated appropriately. Your accusation of trolling is as inaccurate as it is inflammatory.

In hindsight, I think you're right; it was unnecessarily confrontational. I apologize.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[RLiegh]

No sweat; take it easy.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I'll stick with pop3, thank you. I'd prefer to have my messages on my hard drive, where I and I alone am control of what is archived or deleted, and I and I alone am able to access these archives.

IMAP does this. Offline reading of messages is supported.

The advantages of POP3 are.... debateable.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[Matt Perry]

You cannot modify pine and distribute it; you have to make a patch of your changes, and distribute that along with a copy of the source code.

That's no different from qmail and it hasn't stopped all of the qmail people from beating their chests about how superior qmail is to every other MTA.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[polioptera griseoapt]

mutt is not superior. The problems with mutt are:

• Most importantly, mutt relies on a local sendmail program. This is a show-stopper for machines that need to rely their email.
• For the above reason, it is hard to use mutt to manage different email identities with mail relied from different hosts. It is possible to do this in pine.
• The address list is stored locally, not remotely as in pine.

On an unrelated note, for me the biggest advantage of Thunderbird or Gmail over pine/mutt is that I can have more than one email in front of me at once - for instance, I can compose two emails at once, or I can compose an email and while I do that, I can search other emails for info I need. In pine, I need to postpone the composition, which is a pain.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[Teflik]

However, both pine and mutt are locally-installable applications, and that is why I made the comparison between them (as opposed to between pine and gmail, which is about like comparing pumpkins to gym socks IMO).

Comparing the comparison of pine to gmail to the comparison of pumpkins to gym socks is like comparing cherry blossoms to the comparison of maple syrup to communism: nobody would ever stick that crap in their nose.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[RLiegh]

>nobody would ever stick that crap in their nose.

I bet they'd stick it in their pipe and smoke it, though!

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh noes! Whatever will I do! I'd better burn my computer for having non-Free software on it!

Oh no, wait. It's ok. I'm there with the 99.99% of people who use a good tool for the job, rather than compromising the quality of their work just so they can take the moral high ground.

*phew* I was worried for a femtosecond!

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Couldn't you just use screen and run more than one version of pine? As many as you have memory for, in fact?

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[Anonymous Coward]

And gmail is pop3-accessible anyway. So you can use Pine to access your Gmail if you want (i.e. you're a masochist. Mutt rules, pine drools).

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[shellbeach]

Mutt is superior (as is yahoo mail -except when it comes to pop3 access which is becoming less and less relevent every day)!

I'm seriously lost here - are you suggesting that yahoo mail is open source? Otherwise you seem to be making a non-sequitur ...

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate Free Software?

snarf...

[casualsax3]

American slang of the 1920's and 30's referring to someone who draws pleasure from sniffing the seats of girls' bicycles.

Bertha wouldn't roll hoops with Calvin as she considered him a snarf of the worst sort.

Re:Allright...

[Philip K Dickhead]

"However, since I work^H^H^H^H used to work at Google..."

Given that one of the contesters is the judge

[Opportunist]

...I'll take this one with a truckload of salt instead.

Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

So, the guy compares a web-based email client to a text-only standalong email client? That makes no sense, unless of course you suppose that a Google employee *might* be plugging a Google product with a pretense article...

Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer

[Ulven]

From an orange producer who says he prefers apples.

Cynicism is all very well, but make sure there is something to be cynical about first.

Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

From an orange producer who says he prefers apples. Cynicism is all very well, but make sure there is something to be cynical about first.

There's a part you didn't understand in my post : comparing an old, outdated, text email client to a new shiny web-based one is complete nonsense. Therefore, the guy can prefer pine all he wants, nobody will care about his preferences anyway because nobody wants to run pine, but he still managed to rattle off a list of Gmail features. You'll also notice that his "bad" and "ugly" sections list minor problems, while he appears ecstatic about the features in the "good" list.

Good plugs are those that aren't obvious. I maintain that it smells like a plug though.

Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer

[Ulven]

If you were comparing the guis, then the comparison would indeed be nonsense, but I think it's valid to compare two different clients that do the same job, albeit in different ways.

Maybe it is a plug. I can't re-read the article as it's been overwhelmed, but it wasn't the impression I got. I felt that he was just surprised by what gmail actually does, and that carried over into his review.

Either way, no matter what the outcome of his review, he isn't going to change _anyone's_ mind about which is the better client.

Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer

[Peter La Casse]

There's a part you didn't understand in my post : comparing an old, outdated, text email client to a new shiny web-based one is complete nonsense.

Yes. No expert would expect the new shiny web-based one to be as capable as the text email client that he's used for years. You're right to suspect bias when the article concludes that gmail manages to compete.

Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer

[kfg]

comparing an old, outdated, text email client to a new shiny web-based one is complete nonsense.

Ooooooooooo, shiny!

KFG

Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer

[Onan]

There's a part you didn't understand in my post : comparing an old, outdated, text email client to a new shiny web-based one is complete nonsense. Therefore, the guy can prefer pine all he wants, nobody will care about his preferences anyway because nobody wants to run pine...

In what sense is pine outdated? What makes you so sure that nobody wants to run pine? I happily use pine every day, and don't expect to change that any time soon.

Just because you prefer webmail doesn't mean that everyone does. I personally find webmail to be a fundamentally bad idea. gmail seems to be the best webmail implementation out there, but that's a pretty low bar.

(And coincidentally, I use it to read mail from my employer: Google. No, I don't know who wrote this comparison, and I haven't even read it; it's every bit as down for me as for you.)

mirrordot link to the article

[farker haiku]

the article appears to be slashdotted already.

It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing

[multiOSfreak]

There's no need to just use either pine or the Gmail web interface. You could use pine for quick checks to see if there is new mail on your Gmail account (and for periodic backups), and then use the Gmail web interface to organize your mail or to check mail when you're on the road.

Why restrict yourself to just one or the other?

Re:It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing

[Architect_sasyr]

RSS is also available from Gmail if that is an option you would prefer to use. It is handy as hell to just hvae the ticker open in a small xterm, and view them that way. Just my two cents.

Re:It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Would love to know how Pine and Gmail can be used together.
Can we do something similar with Outlook - have outlook get emails from GMail accounts?

Re:It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing

[KingPrad]

Just go into Gmail options and turn on POP3 access. Somewhere (maybe help) it also gives detailed instructions on how to configure about 20 different email clients for it. To Outlook or anything else, Gmail is just another POP3 account to check - nothing special about it at all.

Re:It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing

[Seraph]

Would love to know how Pine and Gmail can be used together.

OK

Can we do something similar with Outlook - have outlook get emails from GMail accounts?

No problem

Re:It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing

[InitZero]

> There's no need to just use either pine or the Gmail web interface.

        Amen!
        I use gmail as my email backup and media extractor. My
primary email client is mail with vi as my editor. I have
been using this combination since 1991 (maybe earlier) and
love it. Pine/mutt/Outlook is for wimps.
        I use a .forward to keep a copy locally and to send a
copy to gmail. Gmail is my off-site backup and SquirrelMail
alternative. When I need to view attachments or do simple
searching, I use gmail. Otherwise, mail does all I need.
        While I do have concerns about gmail's Total Information
Awareness and retention policies, the gmail functionality is
worth the risk. Besides, anyone who doesn't encrypt sensitive
documents is just plain fooling themselves if they think pine
is going to protect them from snooping.

        Matt

One Big Question For Gmail:

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it encrypt your calls to Al-Qaeda?

George W. Bush wants to know (particularly if you are critical of him).

Sincerely,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.

Interesting story, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting story, but I think I'll stick with Pine until Google have finished the beta testing stage

Re:Interesting story, but...

[voice_of_all_reason]

until Google have finished the beta testing stage

Let me guess, you worked on the English translation for the original Metal Gear, right?

"Uh-oh, the truck have started to move!"

Re:Interesting story, but...

[honeypotslash]

Google will never leave their precious beta behind
--
Get a Free Playstation 3!

Re:Interesting story, but...

[timster]

The Brits see "Google" as generally plural, as do some dialects of American English. Some always consider such a noun singular, and others use a more complex rule.

Re:Interesting story, but...

[helicologic]

What, you didn't know collective nouns are plural in British English? Parliament have determined so years ago.

Re:Interesting story, but...

[x2A]

Oh give it a rest. This "corporate is single entitle, not to be confused with the team of people (plural) that it actually consists of" thing is getting boring.

Re:Interesting story, but...

[kelnos]

Apparently it's "in" these days to consider otherwise-singular-sounding company names as plural nouns for subject-verb agreement. Personally I don't get it, and it looks and sounds awful to me, but... there it is.

Re:Interesting story, but...

[brachiator]

It's just non-American usage (although becoming more common in the States). Corporations and such are viewed linguistically as plural groups rather than as the singular entities the legal fiction would suggest. It's a bit maddening though exchanging drafts with British colleagues, with each side correcting the other side's usage and even punctuation. Aah! - the crises over use of the serial comma! :-)

The Nasty Tab Key

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how may e-mails I've sent that simply say:
Hey (or Mr. X or Ms. X...)

I have the habit of indenting paragraphs with the tab key, which in GMAIL places the cursor on SEND and after a bit of typing and the return key (especially when I'm not watching the screen)... There it goes with no body to the e-mail.

Anonymous reader?

[sk8dork]

Journal written by ejd3 (963550) and posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday April 05, @04:04PM

An anonymous reader writes "Snarfed has an interesting review on Gmail vs Pine [CC].

anonymous, eh?

Strange review!

[caluml]

'I've used the Royal Mail as my main communications method for, well, pretty much forever. I use it because it's fast, powerful, good value, and very reliable. (I hate UPS.) However, since I work at Google, I'm constantly bombarded with people who ask me why I don't use the Internet. After hearing the nth person brag about how much it increased their productivity, I finally broke down and tried it. I didn't expect much, since I've never liked clicking. However, I made myself use it as my only communication method, for a month, to give it a fair shot.'"

What is this? Some guy tries something that everyone has been using for years now? Hey - guess what I found out the other day - cars! I used to walk everywhere..... Hey! I found out about phones last week! They're great - I don't have to travel 50 miles to speak to ....

Next week...

[nizo]

Why LaTex is better than OpenOffice. Does anyone else find this article kind of odd? While I can see my mom using gmail, I don't think I could convince her to use pine. Granted pine might be more powerful, and the additional features he listed are probably worth adding, but pine is sorta.... vt100-ish.

Re:Next week...

[larry bagina]

Actually, it will be "why writely.com is better than LaTex." Written by a google employee. Also look forward to hard hitting articles on google desktop vs Start->Search, google maps vs an atlas, and blogger vs that kook on public access tv.

Re:Next week...

[nizo]

...blogger vs that kook on public access tv...

The best part about the blogger is no matter how ugly/naked he is, I don't have to actually look at him.

Re:Next week...

[deathy_epl ccs]

So, are you saying that somebody forces you to watch public access TV?!?!? Please, tell us where you live so we can be sure to never EVER go there.

Re:Next week...

[iotasmall]

> Why LaTex is better than OpenOffice.

I have no experience with OpenOffice, but I can tell you that LaTeX is more appropriate (better? depends on how you define better) than Star Office or Microsoft Word for my wirting.

> but pine is sorta.... vt100-ish.

People, who judge software purely on whether it is GUI or ncurses based, is like ... Okay, let me share my telephone banking experience. For a few occasions, my HSBC operators from India told me that their number were correct because their computer screens told them so. To them any GUI programme must be better than character interface ones.

Chan Tai Man

Re:Next week...

[njh]

I have no experience with OpenOffice, but I can tell you that LaTeX is more appropriate (better? depends on how you define better) than Star Office or Microsoft Word for my wirting.

Yeah, and the spell checker is better too.

Re:Next week...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I can see my mom using gmail, I don't think I could convince her to use pine.

Well, yeah but your mom isn't likely to be reading Slashdot. Someone who's capable of using Pine is.

Re:Next week...

[Anonymous Coward]

...just try convincing her to give up OpenOffice and wear latex...

elm!

[eln]

Back in the dark ages before webmail, only newbies and English majors used pine. Everyone else either used mail or elm. I personally used elm, and still prefer it if I ever need to use a command-line mail utility, which isn't all that often these days.

The things I hated about Pine were that it unnecessarily reversed colors on the screen to look more "graphical," and its default editor was that horror known as Pico. I much preferred elm and vi.

Re:elm!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The things I hated about Pine were that it unnecessarily reversed colors on the screen to look more "graphical," and its default editor was that horror known as Pico. I much preferred elm and vi.

My first year of college everyone was given a shell account set up with elm and vi. 99% of students could not figure it out on their own. The general engineering course where they taught the basics of vi and elm was a second year course. Needless to say, for that purpose the combination of elm and vi absolutely sucked.

The next year they switched the defaults to pine and pico. Most people figured it out on their own. Maybe that is because pico actually displays the basic commands to the user, rather than expecting them to try to figure out the esoteric help system or have read the man pages beforehand. "Obviously you hit escape-colon-q-bang to quit the editor and get back into your e-mail, what else would it be?" Yeah that is a lot better than cntrl-q with that command actually displayed all the time.

Re:elm!

[Mr. Underbridge]

The things I hated about Pine were that it unnecessarily reversed colors on the screen to look more "graphical," and its default editor was that horror known as Pico. I much preferred elm and vi.

yeah, that just might be the least intuitive combination of programs the world has ever seen.

Re:elm!

[Dr_Ish]

Bravo!! Bravo for Elm and vi. To this day I use this combination when connecting to our servers from home. Of course, it does prevent all those 'Click on this link to see a sexy virus wreck your machine' style games from working properly. Elm is also very good at showing you html as text, so it is easy to spot the Pishers. I love the combination of elm and vi -- it is a fast, powerful and elegant. I am pleased to say that we do not even have Pine or that horror Pico installed on any of our Sun boxes.

Re:elm!

[rk]

I have four editors I like for different tasks:

pico (well, nano really) for editing text files. I do not see what so many of my fellow geeks have against this program. It does a wonderful job in this niche.

vi for quick editing, light to medium-duty programming, and sysadmin tasks. It's fast, easy-to-use once you get over the learning curve, and it's installed everywhere.

emacs or jEdit for heavy-duty software construction. When I am in heads down major software development mode, nothing else will do. Well, I like Komodo from ActiveState and WingIDE for Python stuff, but those aren't free-as-in-beer and I'm a right cheap bastard so I'm not apt to part with the cash.

Re:elm!

[Milton Waddams]

I use Pico when I'm SSHed into somewhere. I don't get all the big hype about vi/emacs. I mean, it's only a text editor. I figure that a text editor should be easy enough to use that it doesn't need you to complete a 24 hour tutorial to use it.

Even now I just use (J|K|G)Edit and edit files directly on the server. I just use Pico for little things like writing emails in mutt or writing posts in slrn (only when I'm logged in via SSH). I think people only use mutt/vi/emacs/whatever other archaic piece of shite software because being seen as a crusty makes them feel empowered or something.

Re:elm!

[captjc]

HEY! Don't talk shit about pico!

Re:elm!

[m33p]

If you're still using elm, you really ought to consider switching to mutt. Chances are you're running elm with the ME extensions. The ME stands for Michael Elkins, who went on to write mutt. I started using elm way back in 1988 (yes, 18 years ago) and didn't switch to mutt until 2002 (or thereabouts.) My fingers were so conditioned to type "elm" for mail I had to create a shell alias from elm to mutt, and to this day, I still type elm to get into mail. -p.

Re:elm!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we like those archaic pieces of software because we can do a LOT and do it VERY FAST.

I've got nothing against easy-to-use editors. But once you've learned a powerful editor, you can be a lot more efficient. It has nothing to do with being crusty. Read the pragmatic programmer, and grow up.

Re:elm!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for posting that. It would be hilarious if we could send this thread back in time 15-years ("hey look the PINE USERS are trying to look hardcore!") I remember around 1994 there was one guy in our lab who used pine and we teased him mercilessly for it.

Personally I'm a creature of habit so I don't change email clients very often. 1986-1992 I used mailx/Mail, 1992-1997 I used elm, since 1997 I've used mutt. (making the elm-to-mutt transition is really easy, BTW... if you ever need a CLI mailer again give it a shot)

Re:elm!

[donaldm]

Well back in the early eighties I used elm (pine did not exist) and I found it an excellent mail client because I (as a System Admin) could wade through lots of system and personal mail quickly and efficiently. What I found was that while our Scientists and Engineers (I was one) had no issues with elm our Clerical staff hated it because it a learning curve of a few hours.

When pine came out made it available to our Clerical people and they found it initiative and very easy to learn. The default editor (pico) was very easy for them as well. In fact for casual users of our system who needed to edit something on a Unix system then pico was excellent, of course vi was what all Sys Admins (they still do) and programmers used. Then along came Emacs and for those people that really needed a bells and whistle editor then this was it, however the learning curve was very high.

As far as choosing an email client or an editor this is really dependent on the expertise of the user and the requirements for using them. If you need to read email from a computer intranet then using Google to read your mail is stupid so a client like pine, elm, mh, xmail ...... etc is the best way to go and yes you can forward that mail to your PC or to another mail repository however this is rather pointless and in some instances a security breach.

I myself can use any mailer graphic or otherwise but I do have a soft spot for pine (not the best but if you have had to use "mail" or "mailx" then you would love it) and actually use it on the machines I manage. I also use Exchange (sigh!! - corporate only) and in addition use Gmail for test purposes and for private use.

Actually this pine vs Gmail is not much more different to the vi/Emacs wars (rants) of the mid eighties except those were really passionate. My feeling then and now is you really should use the right tool for the right job providing the tool you use is suitable and you are comfortable and proficient in it's use.

Re:elm!

[mrjacques]

"...that horror known as Pico"?

Whut's wrong with Pico? I love it.

Re:elm!

[Anonymous Coward]

I finally had to give up using elm a few years ago when a former employer starting using, you guessed it, Microsoft Exchange. At the same time, they stopped allowing smtp connections to their mail server, and the default setting for everyone using Exchange was HTML. Of course, when I replied to someone's email, with all that HTML garbage in the attributed text, everyone told me *my* email was broken. I now use GUI or browser based email readers, which are cumbersome, inefficient, and promote email no-nos like rich text and background images. I sucks royal. The Golden Age of Email is over. I really miss the efficiency of *real* email.

I upgraded from PINE too, for the spam filter

[Zatar]

I used PINE up until the start of this year. The main reason I finally started using gmail instead of PINE is that it filtered all my spam out a lot better. I was running all my mail thru SpamAssassin and then SpamBayes and I still got 20-30 spams a day. With gmail I'm down to 1 or 2 usually, although there are occasionally false positives on my mailing list traffic. Unfortunately you cannot whitelist incoming mail by subject line in gmail.

Re:I upgraded from PINE too, for the spam filter

[Anonymous Coward]

With gmail I'm down to 1 or 2 usually, although there are occasionally false positives on my mailing list traffic. Unfortunately you cannot whitelist incoming mail by subject line in gmail.

I've also had false positives. Which is particurlarly annoying because I can't retrieve email marked as spam except with the web interface.

I switched away from pine to thunderbird for integrated PGP support. I use gmail as my mail server currently, but wish I could disable spam filtering or retrieve email marked as spam from thunderbird. Last time I emailed google, neither was possible.

TFA

[casualsax3]

The Good

* It's somewhat faster than your average IMAP server. (Of course, this is both a success of Gmail and a failing of most IMAP servers.)

* Gmail is smart about hiding quoted text and emails i've seen. This rocks. Somehow it even knows the 1% of cases where I actually do want to see the quoted text. I have no idea how.

* The UI for threading, or >>conversations in Gmail lingo, rocks even harder. The killer feature is that the bodies of all messages in the thread on a single screen. Combined with hiding quoted text, this is very powerful.

* Mail is indexed. My average search takes under a second in Gmail, but around 10 seconds in Pine.

* >>Tags, aka labels or virtual folders, are all the rage these days. GMail's implementation of them is slick, and eminently usable. Pine's >>keywords offer most of the same functionality, but compared to Gmail, they're a little clunky.

* There are keyboard shortcuts! Wonder of wonders, it's a webapp that has keyboard shortcuts. Even more amazing, I can actually do most of my normal email tasks with the keyboard shortcuts only. If I couldn't, I never would have given Gmail a second glance.

* I love the Y key, a single keystroke for archiving email. Archiving in pine takes two keystrokes at best, and four if I last saved to a different folder than my "archive" folder.

* The address book is great, mostly because I never have to use it. Gmail automatically remembers everyone I've sent email to or received email from, and auto-completes when I start type their name or email address. I wish Pine did this!

The Bad

* Filtering has a great UI, but it's horribly weak. It has maybe a third of the headers and options that I normally filter on. You can't OR or NOT filter conditions. The set of filter actions is anemic, even with labels. Want me to go on?

* There's no way to bounce an email. This should be pretty trivial to add.

* If no email is selected, the Y key should archive the email under the cursor. This should be common sense.

* You can't automatically create a filter based on an email. Why not?

* You can search, but you can't select messages based on headers, subject, or body text. Worse, if you have more messages than fit on the screen, you can't select any messages that aren't on the screen. If you ever get flooded with email, or with spam that escapes the spam filters, god help you.

* Thank god there are keyboard shortcuts...but there aren't nearly enough! I don't mind using the mouse for one-time stuff, but if i have to use it often during my normal email routine, that's a deal breaker. Keyboard shortcuts for go to label, go to sent mail/drafts, and select all/none/unread would be necessary if I was ever to go back to Gmail.

The Ugly

* Marking messages as read is impossible with the keyboard, and takes three clicks with the mouse: Select ___, More Actions, Mark As Read. I could just leave them unread, but then the labels display is useless for showing which mailing lists have new mail.

* Selecting a message doesn't automatically move the cursor to the next message. This is just plain silly.

* The Y key is horribly inconsistent. If you're in the Inbox, it archives. If you're in a label, it removes the label. If you're in spam or trash, it moves to the Inbox! This is a bad case of modal input.

* Gmail might be smart about (not) displaying quoted text, but it can't handle composing with quoted text to save its life. There are a ton of problems with this, but among others, it needs a way to >>remove trailing quotes when sending.

Re:TFA

[tlacuache]

You can't OR or NOT filter conditions.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, I think you can do this. I've got a filter I use to make sure emails from my wife don't get the same label as the chats from my wife. from: email@email.com subject: -"Chat with Andrea" Isn't the minus sign used as a NOT when filtering?

Re:TFA

[advid]

* The Y key is horribly inconsistent. If you're in the Inbox, it archives. If you're in a label, it removes the label. If you're in spam or trash, it moves to the Inbox! This is a bad case of modal input.

Actually, this is very consistent. 'Y' always removes the currently viewed label.

It's important to understand that all the special folders in Gmail are just 'magic' labels: 'Inbox', 'Spam', 'Draft', etc... all labels, and displayed as such in the message view and all-mail view.

The only inconsistency, from your account, is that removing 'Spam' or 'Trash' adds the 'Inbox' label. (It's possible that this is just a matter of that label never having been removed, and the 'magic' Inbox also filtering on NOT Spam NOT Trash, I suppose. I can't be bothered to experiment, though. :)

Re:TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

* Filtering has a great UI, but it's horribly weak. It has maybe a third of the headers and options that I normally filter on. You can't OR or NOT filter conditions. The set of filter actions is anemic, even with labels. Want me to go on?

You can use OR conditions:
from:(foo OR bar)

You can also use NOT conditions:
-from:foo

I agree that the filter actions could be a bit more robust, but they rarely cause me much grief.

Re:TFA

[ffflala]

Filtering has a great UI, but it's horribly weak. It has maybe a third of the headers and options that I normally filter on. You can't OR or NOT filter conditions. The set of filter actions is anemic, even with labels. Want me to go on?



You can create multiple filters to a single label. This gives you the same result an OR filter on multiple terms would.

Re:TFA

[quokkapox]

* Gmail is smart about hiding quoted text and emails i've seen. This rocks. Somehow it even knows the 1% of cases where I actually do want to see the quoted text. I have no idea how.

They indexed your mind. They're testing it out with a subset of users. It's beta.

Re:TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Use this nice greasemonkey script http://persistent.info/archives/2006/03/21/gmail-m acros (the patched version in the second response to the thread is best) to get the ability to go to any label, add labels, and mark multiple messages via the keyboard. It also gives a consistent keystroke for "Read and Archive". With the the mouse becomes entirely unnecessary. Gmail preview bubbles are also nice: http://persistent.info/archives/2005/08/20/gmail-p review-bubbles.

Re:TFA

[ryanov]

Unless I'm mistaken, you can't select ALL of your e-mail, either. You have to select a screen at a time, and you can't make those screens larger.

Google could really learn a lot from this article.

However, since I work at Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to be the one to tell you this buddy, but you better not check your company inbox when you clock out :(

Loser

[stinerman]

Heh ... you're using Pine? Real nerds just telnet to port 110.

</sarcasm>

Re:Loser

[From A Far Away Land]

"Real nerds just telnet to port 110"

Oh yeah? Well I have pigeons deliver my GMail packets and I hand decode the ones without the evil bit set to on.

Re:Loser

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh ... you're using Pine? Real nerds just telnet to port 110.

No, real nerds telnet to port 995...

Re:Loser

[jamesots]

No, real nerds run 'netcat -l -p 25'

Re:Loser

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Real nerds don't open another unnecessary port and STARTTLS instead.

Re:Loser

[Anonymous Coward]

I learned how to do that. POP is easy to learn and remember!
And let me tell you, it *really* impresses the girls.

It's too bad I can't calculate secure-login hashes in my mind.

Re:Loser

[bmalia]

I remember back in the day when being a nerd was a bad thing. Now people argue about who is the nerdiest. Wow.

Re:Loser

[stinerman]

Oddly enough my networking professor, who I must say was huge on command line apps in general, showed us how to telnet in to port 25 to send "anonymous email". I'll never forget how he described the evils of "cumbersome email clients". "Why use Outlook or Thunderbird", he said, "this is much easier."

Re:Loser

[ahem]

Pansy. I personally listen and reply over port 25 using nothing but cat and tail.

Re:Loser

[Nosklo]

I remember back in the day when being a nerd was a bad thing. Now people argue about who is the nerdiest.

It was back in the day you where in a place with girls and normal people.

Now you are at slashdot!

Re:Loser

[dodobh]

s_client imaps.example.com 993

Re:Loser

[MikeBabcock]

Its still like that out there in meat space. Luckily, there's mail order and ham radio ;-)

Thunderbird

[honeypotslash]

Or you can use Thunderbird and have access to any pop or imap mail...
--
Get a Free Playstation 3!

I use both, but Gmail wins

[Rude Turnip]

I've been using Pine since 1994 or 1995 when I got an account on my college's Solaris network. When I signed up for a web hosting service a few years ago, I made sure that a) I could SSH into some flavor of *nix and b) they ran Pine. It took no time at all for Pine to show its age and inflexibility. First of all, I can't always SSH into my service, but a web browser can be found almost anywhere. When it comes to sending or receiving attachments, basically any web or local-based email client pwns Pine. With Pine, I need to FTP attachments up and down from the server. That said, I still love its interface...each function is a button press away and the command options are displayed on the bottom of the screen. Honestly, if Google one day decided to implement a web-based and multimedia-enabled Pine-like interface for Gmail with all of its keyboardy goodness, I'd be in heaven.

Re:I use both, but Gmail wins

[Anonymous Coward]

I use pine on my university account; I haven't tried gmail (don't see why I'd want contextual ads with my mail), but maybe I should take a look sometime.

"First of all, I can't always SSH into my service, but a web browser can be found almost anywhere."

If you take a look for Mindterm SSH, it'll solve this. It's a java applet-based SSH program. Any browser with Java can give you access! Also, just about every OSX or linux/bsd system has ssh installed natively.

It is true that pine makes attachments very awkward, and there's no real way around this. For me, this isn't really a problem - it prevents Outlook-style viruses, and most emails are text only. Most people don't needlessly send Word files, unless it is being passed around during editing. Enough people in the department use pine that new secretaries seem to learn noone will read their messages if they just attach a Word file. But if you regularly had to deal with attachments, it would get old fast. (Not strictly true...if you have an X server running, pine should be able to open a Word attachment in OpenOffice or web page in Firefox and have it show up on your screen just like any other mail client. But X is underused these days...)

Lucky guy

[canoramix]

If you work for Microsoft and you use Pine to access your Hotmail account you've already meet SteveB for a nice one-on-one :-)

Re:Lucky guy

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean chair-on-one?

trust and control

[drDugan]

I use mutt and I run my own mail server on hardware I own. It's not that hard. I have given gmail a fair shot, and for a time, was using it to archive my mail. It's a great product but I will not use it.

WHY?

Because I don't trust the corporate motivation and the corporate mentality that lurks behind Google, or the people who implement their policies.

Google a company and its officers are legally obligated to increase shareholder value, not protect my privacy, or stand for what is right or fair. When the governement comes knocking with an illegal search, they will roll over. Those emails I sent to my friends bitching about some politician... may not be so private. Google's policies give them the right to change the rules in the future, and they have all my communication. Given the trajectory of world events - who knows where things will go.

The other problem is one of people. People can be weak, especially one who need money. When then market is really hot for some other person to buy or sell information, some person will be tempted to take my mail from the Google datacenter, burn a DVD and mail it off to Madison. I wouldn't even know.

Before you say that "I have nothing to hide" - consider printing every email and text message you write and posting them on your office/cubicle or (home) front door. Think about a world where there was a public repository of everyone's phone calls and anyone could go back and listen. Would you feel like you could really express yourself? Everybody has private stuff - lots of it. If you still disagree, mail me your ssn, name, and birthdate.

Communication is too important to blindly trust that someone else will be responsible and look out for your interests.

Re:trust and control

[X0563511]

That's great if you can have your own static IP and have your machines and connection up 24/7. I know I can't...

Re:trust and control

[drDugan]

mea culpa for all the typos. I'm rushing around this afternoon.

Re:trust and control

[RLiegh]

Dyndns is a great solution to the dynamic IP problem; however most ISPs have provisions in their TOS that specifically forbid the use of email -or other- servers.

Re:trust and control

[drDugan]

sdf offers free shell accounts

or better

other great providers offer near-free (like $10/month) root on virtual/shared machines
see http://redcheckhosting.com/ as an example

or best

find someone you know personally and trust to give you a shell account

Re:trust and control

[Anonymous Coward]

If you still disagree, mail me your ssn, name, and birthdate. Umm...umm.... 123-45-6789 Robert A Frost February 30th 1943! Yea, can't trust anyone...

Re:trust and control

[lucidityZ]

I'm sad to say i agree completely. For a company who's motto used to be "Don't be evil," Google sure has changed a lot. I wish i could keep my own mail server, but since i can't, i'm more comfortable having my university keep my email. This school tends to protect the privacy of its students rather aggressively, and corporate interests are much less involved this way. I'm fairly certain the only way the government would end up with one of my messages is if they came to my school with a warrent for one. With google, who knows? To those who nievely trust Google, i say, "just wait."

Re:trust and control

[suggsjc]

Name: Henry Ostenoff SSN: 418-25-0916 Birthdate: 04/05/2006 Bring it on, you can't do anything with that data. That's the oldest scare tactic in the book. It's not like I was born yesterday...wait...nevermind. So yeah, we all have things we don't want made public. However, the things that I do say over gmail and "non-controlled" mediums aren't worth the effort for someone to subpoena Google for my conversations. If I have something that I really don't want to be traceable, then there are ways. But just for me organizing a campout, or forwarding all of the "if you want to be popular forward this to at least 8 people in the next 8 minutes" messages, then go right ahead. Privacy is one thing, paranoia is another...don't confuse the two.

Re:trust and control

[Anonymous Coward]

with those 3 pieces of information anyone can assume an identity and get all relevant government documents.

precaution only looks like paranoia when there are no issues. when issues arise, then one is either prepared or not.

You never know what the future will hold.

Re:trust and control

[vux984]

Birthdate: 04/05/2006... It's not like I was born yesterday...wait...nevermind.

No you were right, you weren't born yesterday. You were born today.

However, the things that I do say over gmail and "non-controlled" mediums aren't worth the effort for someone to subpoena Google for my conversations.

What effort? Google excels at search and correlation. Supposing google has your communications email and IM history, and hosts your blog -- if all that's in the index its likely to be a very fertile harvest.

All the government has to do decide google has to give them google access to their mail archives.

If I have something that I really don't want to be traceable, then there are ways.

You might be surprised at how perfectly inane conversations can be extremely embarrassing or damaging if publicized in the right places.

No one would ever dredge up your college indiscretions during an election you were in? Sony wouldn't be interested to know that a potential employee sent an email a couple years back to their friends advising them that some Sony product was junk? Your bank wouldn't be interested to know that you sent numerous emails to your landlord letting them know rent would be a couple days late? Your insurance company wouldn't be interested to here that you got a great deal on cigars while abroad? (oh... you smoke? you said on your application you don't.)Or perhaps they'd be intrested to know that you organize campouts in the mountains -- a lot of people get hurt doing that mountain climbing stuff you know... maybe your premiums ought to be nudged up a touch. And of course, Tents-R-Us will also want to get in touch with you about any tent requirements such campouts might entail.

Google's sitting on that growing database... right now its mostly private... but you seem to think opening it up and letting everyone take a look see is a good thing...

I'd hate to live in that world.

Privacy should be the default, not something you have to go out of your way to get. If I send a private email, I expect it stay private; I don't *care* that it simply says I'll be at my friends party at 8pm. If I want to make it public that should be up to me.

Privacy is one thing, paranoia is another...don't confuse the two.

There is nothing paranoid about simply wanting your mundane life to your own private business.

Re:trust and control

[k2enemy]

Google a company and its officers are legally obligated to increase shareholder value, not protect my privacy, or stand for what is right or fair.

I don't want to (and won't) get into an off-topic argument about corporations, but this simply isn't true.

Re:trust and control

[onemorehour]

Google a company and its officers are legally obligated to increase shareholder value, not protect my privacy, or stand for what is right or fair.

Why would it be good for shareholder value for google not to protect your privacy, or stand for what is right or fair? I understand that it's not their primary concern, but too many people make statements like this, as if the two concepts were unrelated. Google is staking its name on standing for what is right and fair. If it rolls over, as it has done in the recent past, it gets excoriated in the media, which is bad for business. This provides a somewhat powerful profit motive for Google to live up to its image. Maybe not as powerful as the profit motive for not getting shut down by the Justice department, but...

Also, I think that your implied assumption that there's such a thing as privacy in email is pretty off-base. What happens when your ISP gets a subpoena? How many businesses are logging the 1s and 0s coming from your computer through their networks? Are you using strong encryption for everything? Are you sure your private key can't be obtained?

Re:trust and control

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is the new Microsoft. The bigger they get, the more people are going to love to slam them and make up lies about them. They've ruined the internet as far as I'm concerned with their search rankings methods.

Re:trust and control

[suggsjc]

No you were right, you weren't born yesterday. You were born today.

True, just this first day has been so long must have lost track of time...

Google's sitting on that growing database... right now its mostly private... but you seem to think opening it up and letting everyone take a look see is a good thing...

I never said that I wanted it to open up. I'm not saying that you are, but some people almost live in fear of "big brother" and spend great amounts of time "covering their tracks" so that they can ensure their "anonymity." Great and good, but they preach it like a religion. I on the other hand would rather have my "college indiscretions" and just go on with my life...yes, with blind trust put in some institutions.

Blind trust, would I give out personal info to a bulk email request? No. Would I give it to a friend? Probably. Would I give it to a company that my friend worked for? Maybe. Some random site? Probably use fake info and my "spam email address." Point being, established corporations (however corrupt you can make them out to be) for the most part have to adhere to some (at least) basic ethical standards. If they don't they will get due publicity for their wrong doings and people will probably shy away from their services. So, if google does start giving google access to mail accounts, then I'll change my service. Until they do, their ability to "anonymously" track my habits and profile me is worth the benfits and usefulness that I am about to gain from their services.

Paranoia is objecting to [fill in the blank] without even considering the benefits...just objecting "for the cause"

Sanity is doing an honest analysis of the situation, and if the benefit is greater than the "cost" then you should use the service.

FYI, I agree with what you are saying in principle...some people just take it to an extreme that is well paranoia. I enjoy playing devil's advocate, so I'm not attacking you directly (unless you ARE one of those people, j/k).

Re:trust and control

[drDugan]

Instead of simply stating my view is false without support, please do enlighten us all with your views on corporations, and the legal pressures they face concerning profits vs. the quality of the services they offer.

As for topical relevance in this discussion, the choices that Google makes and the motivations behind them are a central part of the choice to use Pine or Gmail.

Re:trust and control

[drDugan]

"Why would it be good for shareholder value for google not to protect your privacy, or stand for what is right or fair?"

With this statement you are either incredibly naive or simply trying to flamebait. Google is an entity in competition with many others in the world, and they will cross whatever lines they can (need) to succeed in that competition. As a business entity, the rules are very clear: you make money first, and factors that affect making that revenue are weighed only with regard to how much they affect your ability to take money. The choices a company makes are limited only by what the market demands economically - not a rational evaluation of standards or morals. As such Google cares about these higher ideals to the extent that their bottom lines are changed if they break them. As we all know, most people do not evaluate the services they choose or the companies they visit based on idealistic principles, but rather marketing and whim.

As for the recent media flap - Google was hardly excoriated, and no one really cared.

As for when my ISP gets a subpoena - I'll know about it if they go into my machine. I'll know if they log into the console, or try to pull my private keys off the machine. I recognize that email is sent in the clear, and when someone wanted to, computers deep in the ground outside DC will have a log of all the email in and out.

BUT -- there is a big difference between knowing what is happening and not knowing when anyone (including the governement) decides to try and fsck you over.

Re:trust and control

[sznupi]

You're giving up your privacy the moment you're using plaintext mail, ANY mail. Anybody relying the message has acces to it. So sorry, but you're dellusioning yourself - the only certain way is encryption. And then it doesn't matter which mail provider you're using...

Re:trust and control

[Anonymous Coward]

this information is readily available in any basic business or economics book. you made an outrageous (and false) claim in your original post without any evidence, yet you demand it of people that reply?

directors have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and ultimately answer to shareholders with voting rights. there is no legal obligation to seek short term profits. if shareholders feel that management is not acting in their interest they vote in a new management or the stock price gets depressed and the company becomes a target for takeover.

maybe you are thinking of class-action shareholder suits. these result from officers witholding information, giving misleading information or reducing transparency, not from missing opportunities for profit.

Re:Bleh.

[n2art2]

Diddo on that.

I dare say Yahoo is "better" at most everything, with the user in mind. OMG

No pine for me, so sad. :(

[porcupine8]

I recently found out that the school I'm headed to for my PhD (Northwestern) no longer supports Pine. Even William & Mary, which is not a very tech-savvy school, had a unix server for me to SSH to to use Pine. Looks like I'll probably finally figure out Mail.app unless I want to be stuck with their webmail.

I like Yahoo Mail much better than GMail, but either is preferable to most colleges' webmail pages...

Re:No pine for me, so sad. :(

[CableModemSniper]

./configure --prefix=$HOME

Re:No pine for me, so sad. :(

[Anonymous Coward]

./configure --prefix=$HOME

Pine doesn't use autoconf. In fact, the last time I tried it there wasn't even an install script.

Re:No pine for me, so sad. :(

[CableModemSniper]

I was trying to get across the concept more than the actual method.

Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?

[Ilgaz]

I see everyone switching to gmail from their good working ISP mail or other providers.

I can't see a point here. All I see (as advantage) is POP3 but you give Google right to harvest your personal mails for that. Is it OK for you? OK, next time don't jump up and down when poor shareware tries to check for updates over net as "Spy!!!"

For example, when I gave up Spamcop mail, I checked around and there are marvellous and amazing sites just dedicated to mail. One could be http://fastmail.fm/

As a "geek" you must check that and you will be surprised I bet. I mean, at least they offer TLS IMAP and TLS SMTP. It is 2006, come on!

So why people advertising google for free? I mean, like some sort of "googleogy" has been founded and I was offline during that... Let me in, I want to join too! :)

I use Yahoo mail since '98. If they offer secure IMAP and SMTP for the price, I will even buy "premium" one.

We can't make ISPs use IMAP, amazing but true. If it comes to "using another 3rd provider", that is the time I DEMAND it.

Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?

[Alistar]

I would say the major benefit of Gmail, or any webmail system, over ISP email is that if I switch ISPs I still have the same email address.

Now admittedly, if Google goes down, Im screwed, but then Im screwed along with a lot of other people and it will make it a lot easier to explain to people that my email address has changed because everyone else had it happen too.

Heck I still have a yahoo mail and a mail.com account that has lasted me 4+ ISPs.

Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?

[Anonymous Coward]

unadulterated SPAM in this thread for a commercial enterprise

Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?

[Ilgaz]

(AC Says)

Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?
  (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on 0:58 6th April, 2006 (#15071231)
unadulterated SPAM in this thread for a commercial enterprise

"unadulterated |??n??d?lt??r?tid| adjective not mixed or diluted with any different or extra elements; complete and absolute : pure, unadulterated jealousy." says OS X dictionary (Oxford)

Am I really spamming you think? OK, feel free to report it to Slashdot admin.

I know not to reply to AC trolls but if you look that way, the STORY is Spam itself. E.g. Gmail mentioned. I also didn't know "fastmail" which was created by 2 guys and offering free services became an ENTERPRISE.

Next time you blame a person who PAYS for Reporting SPAM for SPAMMING, be careful. There are laws against it.

Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?

[swv3752]

Heck, I still have a Hotmail account from before it was owned by Microsoft. That was before I even had an ISP.

Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?

[code65536]

Yep, it did. :) I recently switched my domain e-mail to Gmail (it's now auto-forwarded to Gmail; am not using Gmail for domains yet) instead of using a "real" e-mail system... why?

It gives me flexibility. Here are the three reasons:
1) It gives me secure SMTP and POP, so I can use e-mail in the traditional way.
2) Downloading using POP does *not* remove the e-mail from the web-based inbox (unless you want it to). This way, it's almost a bit like IMAP where I can have a copy of all my e-mails in my e-mail client, but if I'm on the go, I can also access all my e-mails via the web.
3) Google lets you set different From: addresses, which lets me use my GMail account to send e-mail on behalf of a number of different addresses.
4) And the AJAX is kinda nice, too. Other webmail interfaces are clunkier than Pine (which I am also fond of), but Gmail's is the first *usable* web interface I have seen.

Overall, Gmail gives me the sort of access-anywhere flexibility that I used to get from Pine. Except while most public terminals do not have SSH (this is criminal; a SSH client should be included in every Windows PC), pretty much every public terminal that has access to the Internet has a web browser. It's the unfortunate byproduct of people equating HTTP(S)/WWW == Internet, but oh well, it's how the cookie crumbles.

Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?

[Ilgaz]

I have fallen back to ISP mail these days and had chance to review all mail providers (including yahoo, which you know in fact rocketmail).

There are sites, I mean trustable ones (not spammers etc) are supporting the latest IMAP technologies and latest security.

That is the thing which I don't get. Why GMail?

Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?

[ryanov]

Fastmail is fantastic. It's relatively inexpensive, it's fast, it allows me to add e-mail addresses to consider being "me," I can check mail from wherever I want, the spam filters are highly customizable... You really can't find a better provider. And you can try it for free, albeit with bandwidth/storage limitations. You also get a public filespace.

No, I don't work for them, but I'm tired of ISP's offering POP only. If you check your mail from more than one place and can't stand webmail (browsers are slow on older machines, let me use a real program with none of the overhead), Gmail is not an option. I use it, but only to have bills sent to.

I couldn't either I went to mirrordot to read it.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mirrordot.org/

I used the other tree...

[Kris_B_04]

Until 2000 or so, I used Elm...

Is it even still around? The only reason I stopped was I couldn't telnet into my account anymore. Some sort of security issue? *veg*

Ah, those were the days..

Kris

Re:I used the other tree...

[Mike Buddha]

The only reason I stopped was I couldn't telnet into my account anymore.

SSH. Elm rocks Pine's world.

Re:I used the other tree...

[Kris_B_04]

LOL

oops, sorry.. don't worry, no one will notice!!! :)

k

Works for Google?

[dark_panda]

If this guy does indeed work for Google, perhaps he could take a crack at fixing the problems he sees in the gmail source. As I understand it, everyone in Google gets access to all of their source code and can hack away at stuff even if they're not directly involved in the project. It would be pretty awesome if he could fix some of the problems (several of which I agree with) and present them as fixes to the people in Google that run gmail.

J

Re:Works for Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I worked at google (left end of last year). In the old days, yes, everyone did have easy access to all the source code. So it was basically "internal-only" open source. In 2004 (IIRC), a couple of interns were caught selling pagerank source code to a seo company. Since then, they've restricted access. You can still access it, but you need to get permission and provide a reason why you need to.

Re:Works for Google?

[barzok]

How do they manage this with all the Sarbanes-Oxley controls that are required for public companies?

I'm lucky that I'm even able to see the code for an app I'm responsible for; my read-only access to its database has been removed (SOX fears) so I can't even do analysis or troubleshooting, and I need approval from a VP before I can actually commit anything pertaining to the functionality of the app to the source code repository.

diddo

[Anonymous Coward]

freebsd + postfix + mutt on my own goddam hardware

Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[sgant]

This guy works for Google, and he didn't use Googlemail?

Isn't that like working for GM and you drive a Ford? Or how about you work for Toyota and you drive a 1957 Belair because "I hate fuel injection".

Dude, it's 2006, get with the program. Well, at least he did try using it for a month, but I don't know the outcome as the website is farked.

But anyway, people like this call others "Luddites" even though they themselves are stuck in a time-warp. I suppose there are different degrees to Luddiatry (yeah, I make words up).

But hey, good times right?

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[TheComputerMutt.ca]

The outcome is that he went back to Pine, though he thought Gmail was the best webmail he's every tried.

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Luddiatry (yeah, I make words up)"

If the word you want is not in the dictionary, then that's the right course. I doubted, however, that you were the first who wanted to derive a word like this from Luddite, so I investigated.

Google finds no hits for your spelling and forty hits for "Ludditry", so most people trying to make up a word along those lines have chosen a different spelling. Moreover, Luddism does appear in unabridged dictionaries, and I think it might have served your purpose.

I don't mean to be critical. I think "Luddiatry" is fine in your post, as it adds a connotation of a false religion to the word, in analogy to idolatry.

On a side note, Spellbound for Firefox does not have enough words in it. I frequently run across words I think should be there but aren't, like Luddism.

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[Hal_Porter]

Well, at least he did try using it for a month, but I don't know the outcome as the website is farked.


Maybe the Googlebot decided to index it back into the stoneage.

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[NewNole2001]

Even Marissa Mayer Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience uses PINE for her business email:

I use Gmail for my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast.

I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college.

Sorry about the crappiness of the website I linked to, but CNN doesn't know how to design for FF yet.

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[ncc74656]

This guy works for Google, and he didn't use Googlemail?

Isn't that like working for GM and you drive a Ford? Or how about you work for Toyota and you drive a 1957 Belair because "I hate fuel injection".

You must be related to this /.er.

BTW, fuel injection was available on the '57 Bel Air.

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[IndigoParadox]

I frequently find most spell checkers to be seriously lacking in vocabulary. So I still keep the old unabridged dictionary and if the spell checker picks something up and it's in the dictionary or it's a technical term, I just add it. I figure the programmers are programmers and not linguists. Oh well. =O/

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[Wdomburg]

If you use and know something, why abandon it for the new and shiny?

Sure, Gmail has some neat features, but Pine is an incredibly mature and flexible program, and damn efficient from a user interaction standpoint once you learn to use it.

(I use a mix of clients depending on what I'm doing - primarily Evolution, followed by Pine, followed by a couple varieties of web mail.)

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

[Ira Sponsible]

Your apology is entirely unnecessary. I clicked ye olde "View this page in IE" and it looks like crap there too. Looks just fine in Lynx though (many websites are best viewed with Lynx).

Gmail is NOT an e-mail client, you fool

[Stormwatch]

Gmail is an e-mail service, usually web-based, but also accessible by any email client. Pine is - like Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, or Apple Mail - an e-mail client: an application that is used to read and send e-mail.

Re:Gmail is NOT an e-mail client, you fool

[mattwarden]

Um, he's talking about the Gmail web-based client. It is, amazingly enough, an application used to read and send email. Another cheer for the moderators for modding you up (to insightful, even!).

Re:Gmail is NOT an e-mail client, you fool

[distilledprodigy]

Wrong. GMail is a webbased client. It's just that the connection between the client and the server is invisible to the end user.

Re:Gmail is NOT an e-mail client, you fool

[Stormwatch]

A web-based client does not fit the usual definition of client: the stand-alone program that accesses data from a network service. In that sense, the client is still not Gmail's web-based interface, but whatever web browser that you are using to access Gmail.

Re:Gmail is NOT an e-mail client, you fool

[Anonymous Coward]

At the risk of being labelled a troll, in what "sense" are you talking about? Your whole comment makes no sense.

Re:Gmail is NOT an e-mail client, you fool

[mattwarden]

That's absolute rubbish. With the definition you're using, there are no standalone applications, unless they include their own operating system. (And they certainly couldn't be written in an interpreted or hybrid language, like Java.)

Screw Pine.

[tobiasly]

Pine may be nice for those of you who like a polished, modern interface, but I've found that it takes away too much flexibility for me.

That's why my email client is still telnet and has been for years. I speak SMTP and POP3 directly. Of course CRAM-MD5 logins can be a bit tricky sometimes but once you learn it becomes second nature.

Re:Screw Pine.

[x2A]

I pick up the phone and speak MODEM. I can only manage a low baud rate at the moment, but the level of privacy you get is pretty good, no worries about anyone looking over your shoulder at the screen

Re:Screw Pine.

[Wordplay]

On the downside, all your coworkers now think you're getting hot dolphin phone sex from 1-900-FLI-PPER on company time.

Speed, search, and threading. Thunderbird?

[gihan_ripper]

I'd like to RTFA, but snarfed has been snarfed by Slashdot!

I haven't used Pine for a couple of years now, largely due to the advent of IMAP. My prefered mail client is Thunderbird, but it would be a hard choice between Pine and GMail. Now GMail has some obvious GUI advantages (point and click, drag and drop, images, etc.), but I find its threading to be erratic and searches to be less-than-spot-on. The main advantage of Pine is speed for short emails. This evaporates rapidly if you have to write anything substantial.

I'd argue that the author is probably making the wrong comparison. For most users, the choice is between Thunderbird / Outlook and GMail / Hotmail, especially if IMAP is an option.

Thunderbird is flexible about threading, but it lacks the indexed search of GMail. However, as most users are presumably familiar with text searches (a la grep or even the Window Find tool), Thunderbird search is perfect for my needs.

I enjoy the ability to use multiple accounts and the many useful extensions such as Engmail (for OpenPGP support), my own choice of dictionaries, and RSS support.

There are a few annoyances with Thunderbird, such as less-than-optimal support for multiple accounts, but workarounds are available. I've written about some of the problems and solutions on my blog.

Gmail? Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the stupidist thing about Gmail is the fact that you can't send binaries to anyone with a Gmail account. Yeah, I know you can rename them and all to fool the filter but that's a PITA. What the hell is Google thinking anyway? Disallowing all executables. WTF? It's just not very useful simply because of that. What's the point of 3GB of mail space if you can't even receive binaries?

google and pine?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with Google and Pine? I was just reading this little thing on cnn:

http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/fortune/how_i_wor k/frameset.exclude.html

The first person is a google VP who also uses Pine.

Haven't this people ever heard of Mutt?? Pine is for lightweights.

this post

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's absolutely hilarious that Slashdot posted a story from someone at Google talking about gmail.

Are you guys daft?

For that matter...

[C10H14N2]

On a smartphone, I have SSH. I use Mutt, which automagically scales to my screen and gives me access to 10GB of email, which I can jump around _much_ faster than over the Web, whereas any kind of WebMail on a smartphone is still !@$#%ing AWFUL. Then, when I sit down at a coffeehouse, I also do the thumbdrive routine and have the same interface.

PGP?

[Gadzinka]

OK, can gmail do PGP?

If it does, is my key safe from subpoena from US government, however long it would take, including bought SCOTUS verdict, that Google has to hand it? I mean, when I use local MUA, my key never leaves my laptop. In case of gmail, unless Google implements RSA, AES etc in Javascript, my secret key would have to reside on Google servers...

Robert

PS No, I'm not long-haired, bearded, smelly privacy advocate; my company works with national telecom and data retention laws as well as our contract require us to use PGP whenever we pass personal information of their consumers. There are lots of sane (as in non-nerdy) and legitimate reasons to use crypto.

Re:PGP?

[CableModemSniper]

If you REALLY want to use gmail, and PGP just encrypt the stuff and copy and paste it. Or you can use the fact that Gmail lets you use SMTP to send mail.

Re:PGP?

[Jsprat23]

OK, can gmail do PGP?

Not directly, but by using the GNOME Panel Applet included with Seahorse 0.9.0 you can perform all the usual encryption operations on the contents of the clipboard. Your private key will never leave your personal comuter.

Re:PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail can indeed do PGP because it allows you to get and send mail via POP. I've set up GPG in conjunction with thunderbird and the enigmail extension. Works wonderfully. It took me about 10-30 minutes to set up without any knowledge of either GPG or Enigmail.

Re:PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

In case of gmail, unless Google implements RSA, AES etc in Javascript, my secret key would have to reside on Google servers...

Time to plug my GreaseMonkey script. Gmail Encrypt Take it for a drive and see if it works for you. AES, RSA-like public /private keys. It's all there. Now, if somebody could help me to use actual PGP keypairs then I would be ecstatic.

Re:PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

POP isn't what you send mail through. You send it through SMTP.

Re:PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for the correction. None the less enabling POP3 and using an external mail program allows you to use PGP/GPG.

Re:PGP?

[aliquis]

You can still write the body of the e-mail locally, encrypt the data, copy the resulting text into gmail and then send the e-mail.

But who cares, mutt rocks ;)

Re:PGP?

[emj]

S/MIME is the answer my friend.. There is an extension for encrypting emails directly in Gmail.

http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-smime /gmail-smime.html

Re:PGP?

[swv3752]

If you use Gmail with POP3/SMTP access, then yes. I do it myself Mozilla Mail and the enigmail extension. I guess technically it is GPG, but what's the difference?

Re:PGP?

[Grey_14]

Simply use Thunderbird with the Enigmail extension, it uses PGP to encrypt/sign your messages, then just send them through SMTP, that way your e-mail is also not stored on the gmail servers unencrypted, and your private key never leaves your computer.

Re: PGP?

[Gadzinka]

If you use Gmail with POP3/SMTP access, then yes. I do it myself Mozilla Mail and the enigmail extension. I guess technically it is GPG, but what's the difference?

I can use my gpg/mutt/exim/fetchmail with any ISP I want, which I do. But the article is about Gmail mail client vs Pine mail client, not GMail ISP vs any other ISP.

Robert

Re:PGP?

[Gadzinka]

See #15072581

Robert

Re:PGP?

[Gadzinka]

S/MIME is the answer my friend...

Not when your 800lbs-gorilla-customer tells you that their corporate standard on encryption is PGP (they even have keys signed by corporate cert authority ;)

Anyway, I don't complain, since pgp/gpg exists on every platform and has excelent support in Mutt.

Robert

Re:PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Re:PGP?
>(Score:0)
>by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05, @06:10PM (#15071335)
>
>> In case of gmail, unless Google implements RSA, AES etc in Javascript, my secret key would have to reside on Google servers...
>
>Time to plug my GreaseMonkey script. Gmail Encrypt Take it for a drive and see if it works for you. AES, RSA-like public /private keys. It's all there. Now, if somebody could help me to use actual PGP keypairs then I would be ecstatic.

Wow. Email security application from someone nobody's ever heard of, tested and audited by a team of thou^H^H^H^Hone, and you implemented the crypto and the scheme All By Yourself!

Well hell, where do I sign up? </sarcasm>

Sad part is, you'll probably never even be interesting enough for the first-year cryptography student to find the holes in your code and pwn you.

Re:PGP?

[blake182]

OK, can gmail do PGP?

Is the question "can it do PGP" or is the question "can it do encrypted mail"?

There is a Firefox GMail S/MIME plugin if your goal is encrypted mail that's compatible with the encryption built into most current email clients. I think this also addresses your concern of key storage, since I believe it's in your Firefox keystore.

Re:PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not directly, but

There's your answer right there.

A fair comparison

[mpcooke3]

Gmail does have it's advantages and if it offered IMAP support rather than POP then I would use it.

Of course i'd access it through Pine, not a web browser.

a lot of problems

[akhomerun]

a lot of his problems are with GMail's implementation of keyboard shortcuts (but mind you, not all of them, but about 1/3 of the bad/ugly)

so really some problems are simply with the client not meeting his niche of needing the keyboard for every little thing.

Pretty neat article, though, although I have never heard of Pine.

What's missing in GMail

[brunes69]

Having switched from IMAP to only GMail about 8 months ago, my only gripe is the inability to 'Mark As Read' in filters - this is my #1 pet peeve with GMail and it seems like it would be *tirivial* to do - why haven't they done it?

Oh - another thing that would be nice would be to be able to set a maximum number of messages allowed in a Label and after that to erase the oldest ones. I know, I am asking to make labels more like folders, but when you are on as many mailing lists as I am, that you know are archived anyway, you just don't want to keep copies of all that crap around in your mailbox. It just makes my POP download of messages (for archival) that much more difficult.

Re:What's missing in GMail

[lesv]

Having switched from IMAP to only GMail about 8 months ago, my only gripe is the inability to 'Mark As Read' in filters - this is my #1 pet peeve with GMail and it seems like it would be *tirivial* to do - why haven't they done it?

They are probably waiting for you to go to work there and fix it. :)

Alan Kay: The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Re:What's missing in GMail

[johnnyk427]

"I hate the mouse" Ok, you lost me, and about 99% of people who use computers.

VM, Baby...

[Blrfl]

VM.

Turtle Slow

[RoadDogTy]

Gmail has always been slow, but ever since they added AJAX Google Talk into the equation I pretty much catch a good nights worth of sleep while the page loads. Obviously its more convenient than Pine because everyone has a browser and is familiar with its interface, but I'll probably switch to another kind of webmail soon because I can't take the sluggishness.

Re:Turtle Slow

[smellystudent]

Then switch it off! There's a simple option at the bottom of the page.

Re:Turtle Slow

[dalmiroy2k]

Are you still on 28.8k Dial-up?

Re:Turtle Slow

[jonom]

You must be using a different gmail than me...it's plenty quick on any system I've accessed it from.

Why I don't use GMail

[sootman]

1) Can't sort inbox by sender, size, subject, etc. I mean, I know labels and searching are all the rage these days but why can't I take advantage of basic information that every email message has had for decades?

Actually, that's pretty much it. Call me when they implement that.

Bonus: OK, here's #2: I use Yahoo's webmail. Looking at my inbox, I want to read, say, 5 random messages out of the 10 new ones. So, I middle-click on them to open each one in new background tabs. They are all loaded by the time I start reading the first. After reading one, I usually either delete it or move it to a folder, or mark it as read for future attention. (If I just want to leave it in my inbox, read, I just close that tab.) After clicking on the appropriate button(s), I instantly switch to a different tab and start reading the next message--I don't have to wait for the operation to complete.

I also tried Yahoo's new AJAX mail beta but went back to the old style almost immediately. It's very slick, but I'm happy with the plain-vanilla version. If I ran my own server, I'd probably be happy with squirrel mail.

Everyone's different. If I searched my email a lot or did other things, I might light GMail more. To each his own.

Re:Why I don't use gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

How does Kmail search without indexing?

Re:Why I don't use gmail

[vadim_t]

By subject, in the current folder, pretty much instantly. Or the whole account, without indexing, which is of course going to be fairly slow.

Of course, this doesn't work for everybody. It works just fine with my particular usage pattern, though. I get large amounts of mailing lists and automated mail from various servers. All this is sorted into folders. Mail from work for instance, would be automatically sorted into Work/<company>/Servers/Mail/Cron or Work/<company>/Departments/<department>. The total amount of mail is quite high, but the amount in each folder is quite low. Having to grep the whole account for something is a very rare ocurrence, as keeping it sorted avoids the need in the first place.

Re:Why I don't use GMail

[kayen_telva]

the middle click is a great point

pretty much turns me off gmail

Re:Why I don't use gmail

[ScriptedReplay]

You can use indexing if you want: Configure -> Misc -> Enable full text indexing (this in KMail 1.9.1) and the search bar will do indexed content searches by default.

Re:Why I don't use GMail

[Mean Variance]

Bonus: OK, here's #2: I use Yahoo's webmail. Looking at my inbox, I want to read, say, 5 random messages out of the 10 new ones. I also tried Yahoo's new AJAX mail beta but went back to the old style almost immediately. It's very slick, but I'm happy with the plain-vanilla version.

I concur. I've used Yahoo!'s mail both as my "Yahoo" web mail and it slurps my personal domain mail too. There are a number of reasons I do not like the new mail client in beta, but the main is that I can do quick "find as you type" searches on the classic mail client using Firefox. It's simple and it works. Plus I do use the Calendar Event functionality to track my bills. It's all connected in the classic interface. The new mail client is slow and doesn't cleanly integrate the other pieces (addresses, calendar, notes).

The mail search isn't as neatly integrated as Gmail, but it works. My typical use is I'm looking for a subject or a name. It finds it easily. The deep searches are a little more clunky (separate page with checkboxes for all the folders), but the results are fine.

What's The Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Pine as my email client for, well, pretty much forever. I use it because it's fast, powerful, stable, and very keyboardable. (I hate the mouse.)

I stopped reading right there. No doubt he's one of those people who would rather use Latex than Word, WordPerfect or Writer. Well, the rest of the world PREFERS graphical apps and is no longer interested in hearing from the "emacs rulez" crowd.

Just for the record: VIM!!!11!!

Re:What's The Point?

[masklinn]

Using the keyboard often is much faster than using the mouse, especially when you usually code (you already have your hands on the keyboard), when you've been using the software for a long time (you just know ever shortcut + muscle memory at work = you don't even need to check the screen nor the keyboard to perform an action) and when you're anything but an idiot.

Flash news, even the Design Team of Office 12 (which is pretty much the bleeding edge of office interfaces with the ribbon and all) recognizes the importance of keyboard shortcut, and most buttons in the ribbon should have their own shortcut that will get displayed when pressing ALT (think existing menus but better).

Re:What's The Point?

[LainTouko]

That's not a very good comparison. Latex isn't simply a non-graphical word processor, it's a far more powerful and versatile tool. I mean, word processors are (generally) literally incapable of producing the sort of formatted text output that I want because it's largely mathematical, but even if I was writing about more "conventional" subjects, I would want to use Latex, because it does all that repetitive typesetting for me, so I can concentrate on what I'm writing. Word processors have evolved from typewriters and it shows, they're not designed to exploit the full power of a computer.

Re:What's The Point?

[Hal_Porter]

Keyboard accelerators are a standard Windows thing. Before Win2k they were always visible, but after that they are hidden until you press Alt.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/05/ 03/414317.aspx

Office has always had shortcuts as far as I know, certainly Office 97 has them. Office does it's own UI though, but I think it follows the OS standard at the time it was released. Probably they were hidden until you press Alt in Office 2000. It's hard to tell as the latest copy I have is the 97 one.

Re:What's The Point?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Talking about someone who would rather use Latex than a WP is like talking about someone who'd rather use a CAD package than MS Paint. It isn't so much about "rather" than it is about what you can do with it. "But the rest of the world PREFERS MS Paint", just doesn't matter...

Loading...

[edremy]

Am I the only person cursed to not be able to use Gmail? I'd really like to keep it as a non-work email account, but all I ever see is "Loading...". Mozilla or Opera, doesn't matter- it occurs on every PC I try. It's not based on stuff in the Inbox- it occurs with no messages at all in the Inbox. Oddly, IE works perfectly, but I simply can't use something without tabs or mouse gestures anymore.

Googling the problem doesn't help much. It turns out all I need to do is clear my internet cache. Well, gee, that's nice. I'll just do that every few minutes. Or maybe I'll just use something else. Am I just cursed?

Re:Loading...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you behind a NAT gateway? Try using a proxy server, you may be experiencing MTU issues.

Re:Loading...

[kayen_telva]

i had this as well for awhile are you using the lates versions of those browsers ? between the latest versions and something google did, gmail finally loads for me consistently (why is it so hard for them to make a website JUST WORK ? and whats this BS about MTU from the other guy surfing the web requires MTU modifications. good grief.)

Indexing

[fm6]

Mail is indexed. My average search takes under a second in Gmail, but around 10 seconds in Pine. Ironically enough, Google also provides a tool that can index any mail client's files — Google Desktop. Out of the box, it only supports the biggies (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), but it'd be easy to write a plugin for Pine.

Re:Indexing

[eklitzke]

Except Google Desktop only runs on Windows, and although I know people who use Pine (via Putty) on Windows, I'd venture that most Pine users are running another operating system.

Re:Indexing

[fm6]

Actually, there is a Windows version of Pine. But you're right, Pine people are mostly Unix people. I stand corrected.

There is one reason I don't use gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use gmail because I have to log in, and I fear that any google web searches I do while logged in will be stored in a database linked to my log in.

"Snarfed"

[this great guy]

I suggest we all start using "snarfed" as a synonym for "slashdotted". As in "we have figuratively stolen your server('s bandwith)" == "we have slashdotted your server" == "we have snarfed your server". I like this word better anyway. Thank you, OP, for your contribution to the /. subculture language !

PS: Don't worry about your server, it will be back up online soon when the story will leave the front page.

Re:"Snarfed"

[ewhac]

I suggest we all start using "snarfed" as a synonym for "slashdotted". [ ... ]

"Snarf" already has a definition.

Schwab

Re:"Snarfed"

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you've caused catb.org to be snarfed too. Way to go!

A response (by a former pine user)

[Noksagt]

I like pine. It is a great IMAP client. Crummy license, but we can't have everything. I used to use it & I don't think you give it a fair shake.

* web based, can get to it from any browser anywhere

SSHing in and using pine locally has fairly high availability. If you happen to be at UW & use the web-based version of Pine, then you obviously have it all. If you are at places you can't ssh, there are java applets which can SSH & you can put one up on your own web server.

* indexed by Google for me! I'd venture a guess that if you had a gigabyte of e-mail to search from pine, and you did searches all of the time, you'd not find PINE even capable of achieving the "within one magnitude" result you found.

Pine searches are pretty speedy for a desktop client. They won't grok attachments, of course. But, if you have local mail, you can just use google desktop search (or spotlight or beagle or grep or find or locate or....)

* search is implemented as in Google, i.e., you can enter keywords in any order, any case, etc., and Google pretty much knows what to do. (some may not realize but Google even has nuance in what is returned in what order based on the order keywords are entered -- while still managing to preserve meaningful and complete results)

It is fairly trivial to setup compound searching using either the email client itself or some other general desktop search tool.

* when there are new and wonderful features (there sometimes are) they're their without having to install our update.

And what if you don't like those new and wonderful features. Or what if a coder not at google has a great idea for a new and wonderful feature? He won't be able to add it to Google. He might be able to add it to Pine (though would only be able to distribute it as a patch--but we already covered the lame license).

* html/graphics and multimedia capabilities. While I haven't used PINE in a long time, last time I did, mime was almost an add-on, and a bit gnarly to use.

MIME works fine. Filtering out MIME types works fine. Viewing HTML email as plain text is often useful to extract any information from it. It is easy to send HTML to lynx/(e)links/w3m/etc. Equally easy to open attachments in another program.

* gmail is nicely folded into my browser interface experience. When I send e-mail from Windows, the e-mail is instantiated in a new tab that automatically disappears when the transaction is completed.

I happen to use a window manager that lets me tab any programs together. That being said, I don't see why this is a significant advantage. If you want to check your email, you must always have a tab open to gmail. What if you don't want to have your web browser on? What if you're visiting persnickety java/flash/pdf sites that crash your browser due to some odd firefox extension that has a memory leak?

* gmail auto-saves drafts for me - I've been saved by this a couple of times.

Postponed messages in pine are persistent too.

* keyboard shortcuts (I know the author complains about the inconsistent overloading, but I've found them comfortable and decent especially for being implemented in a browser... maybe a "vi" background is handy after all!)

It is nice that gmail has shortcuts. This is NOT an advantage it has over Pine, though. In Pine, EVERYTHING is a keyboard shortcut.

* gmail keeps all of my data handy, indexed, and available for that future day someone wants to subpoena my records! (kidding)

And they give you plenty of ads based on the content of your email! Oh boy!

I have a gmail account. I think it is the best web-based email out there. I don't think it can yet replace desktop email & won't trust it to until I can more easily transfer all mail, addresses, and settings from and to any other email provider.

3 Words

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Office Outlook

Thanks.

[sgant]

Sounds like a very diplomatic outcome on his part.

It makes sense

[alandd]

It makes sense to compare text only and web based email clients if you look at it from a "pure" email perspective. Perspective: I need a tool to read, write and organize email. What can do that?

Now, if the I were start adding more criteria like must be text based or must display graphic attachments inline or etc., I would start eliminating clients from the comparison.

You are just applying criteria (text and standalone vs. web-based) before you start the comparison. Which also makes sense, if that is the narrower scope you want to apply.

And, I agree with you. The article does feel like a bit of a plug for Gmail. But I expected that as soon as he said "I work for Google," didn't you?

Funny Guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Try sending a PGP encrypted message...

get ready to flame me

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to sound like an anti-nerd, but I use (ahem) M$ LookOut. At work I use it because there is usually a corporate Exchange server (yeah, so?), but more interestingly the integration between Calendar (meeting requests) and Messages is a good time saver, as are sorting rules, even if they are on the lame side. At home I use it because I can get personal mail in one folder, and copies of important work mail in another, etc.

What's the fuss with searching? When I get an email, I READ IT. Then I either respond and sort it into a folder, or sort it without responding, or delete it. When they get old I archive them, but over the years I have only needed to look for an old email about twice.

Filtering? My filter is really simple, I use a whitelist on the server end. If I don't know you, I don't get your email. The drawback is that neither of us is informed if a message is rejected, which is weak. If my ISP would implement challenge/response it would be a wet dream. On the other hand, if I really wanted it I would get an Earthlink account, but for me the added cost is not worth it.

Pine? Are you high? Even Linux has a GUI now, so I can use that pointer thingy to the right of the keyboard thingy.

You can use Pine @ NU

[Noksagt]

I recently found out that the school I'm headed to for my PhD (Northwestern) no longer supports Pine.

I'm at NU. The year I started was one of the last years they offered SSH into a restricted shell which let you use pine. That being said, Pine is an excellent IMAP client. You can run it on your own system. It is free as in beer & you can download binaries for most platforms. You can look at the *nix source code & recompile it to another platform for your personal use.

PINE rules.

[neo]

* If you are using pines search function, you don't know enough about grep and your mail folder.
* Any place with a browser is now a place with putty, if I want to read my mail.
* Archive? I have procmail doing that much better than GMail ever could.
* I get to use my own domain name.
* Holding down the D key in pine feels really good.

I don't hate GMail, but PINE rules.

Re:PINE rules.

[iotasmall]

> * If you are using pines search function, you don't know enough about grep and your mail folder.

Hear, hear.

> * Any place with a browser is now a place with putty, if I want to read my mail.

Of course.

> * Archive? I have procmail doing that much better than GMail ever could.

I feel safe if I have my email archived in mbox format.

> * Holding down the D key in pine feels really good.

There nothing better than it.

> I don't hate GMail, but PINE rules.

There is no doubt about it.

Chan Tai Man

Re:PINE rules.

[ryanov]

Pine has the most convenient seach function I've come across. You may need to enable the aggregate command set, but the search filter that one can then take advantage of is excellent, and you can zoom to an index of only the filtered messages. The keystroke is ";"

Why would I grep?

Re:PINE rules.

[amaiman]

You can use your own domain name with Gmail now, but the feature's still in beta (like most Google applications), and you have to wait for them to approve you:

https://www.google.com/hosted

It's working well for my domain, so far.

WebPine

[Noksagt]

As far as I know, WebPine is only currently available to people at UW. I don't know how their quota system works. Probably in the hundreds of MBs, depending on your seniority.

You can access WebPine from anywhere with a web browser.

WebPine also works with server-side SPAM and virus filtering.

storage

[tgone]

Gmail is a great application. However, I don't use Gmail because Google stores your email indefinitely. There are other privacy issues such as using keywords to generate advertisements. Some will argue this is better than random ads with no relevance. But I could care less if an advertisement is relevant to my message. I'm sticking with my own web host.

I'm an ELM user and also use gmail

[TheGratefulNet]

took me a while to convert over (to pop over ssl) but now that I'm doing a fetchmail process (about once a minute or so) - I get mail in my nice black-and-green vt100 style xterm window, running elm ;)

that takes care of the receiving side. on the sending side, I just allow outbound smtp. I stopped letting inbound in due to all the spam and .ru attacks (sigh).

I run qmail on my local freebsd server and I let fetchmail inject into that queue, then it delivers to ELM.

I got what I wanted - a pure ascii interface to mail, no port25 inbound needed, and I'm happy now.

Gmail is constantly blacklisted

[DougDot]

A warning about gmail: I like it, but it constantly finds itself blacklisted by a number of spam control services, such as http://www.mail-abuse.com/. As a result, I cannot use gmail to send to co-workers, because my company's IT dept. uses the above service. The gmail team either does not care that many organizations simply will not receive mail sent via gmail, or are unable to prevent gmail from being repeatedly blacklisted. Messages to the gmail support team about this issue appear to fall into a black hole. This is curious to me, since even hotmail was able to figure out how to keep from being constantly blacklisted.

Re:Gmail is constantly blacklisted

[gujo-odori]

I work for a well-known spam control service (not the one you mention; we don't blacklist gmail, don't know why anyone would).

WRT your comment that they either don't care or can't prevent gmail from being repeatedly blacklisted, I can't comment on whether or not they care (don't have a gmail account, even) but regarding prevention, I'm not surprised. Nobody can prevent themselves from being bl[ao]cklisted by anyone else. We get some of our IPs blocklisted all the time, not because of customers spamming, but because of backscatter from bounces on forged From addresses. Usually, it's only blocklists that are regarded as unreliable or full-on rogues that list us; we almost never get on a legit one. In any case, we can't *prevent* people from listing us if they really want to, although recently we have taken actions such as not doing double-bounces, as a means of limiting opportunities for it to happen.

It's a shame that the combination of spammers and bogus blocklist operators can force you to be non-RFC compliant in self-defense.

Re:Gmail is constantly blacklisted

[pe1chl]

we don't blacklist gmail, don't know why anyone would

Possible reason: when one sends a spam or other abuse complaint to abuse at gmail.com, an autoreply is returned that tells you to jump through their webform hoops to submit a complaint. The form requires you to split your complaint into headers, subject header, body etc.

IMHO this is an unreasonable way to handle complaints. A plain text message giving a complaint reason and the full headers+body of the offending message should be accepted and handled at abuse at gmail.com.
I can understand why people put gmail on "rfc ignorant" blockslists and similar, for this.

Re:Gmail is constantly blacklisted

[Ash-Fox]

To be RFC compliant, they just have to accept the mail. They can always shove it into /dev/null.

But that's it, that's RFC compliant, they don't have to read it, they don't have to care etc.

Having a autoresponder that says nobody is going to read it is real courtesy, since many people don't do this even because it adds extra traffic to fake spam sources.

SPAM

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to receive a lot of spam on one of my accounts. I forwarded all my emails to my gmail account and asked gmail to reforward them to my original account (of course avoiding any loop). It was much better than any other anti-spam software I have tried before.

Re:SPAM

[ryanov]

I now get "want to invest?" spam about 10 times a day in my INBOX. I've clicked "Report as Spam" many times... no improvement. I've also contacted them to complain, and got only an automated response saying there'd be no real response.

At least with FastMail, their spam filter seems to adapt.

Why I don't use gmail

[vadim_t]

I happen to have almost the reverse opinion.

• It's web based, has more latency than kmail.

• It's indexed by google. Thanks, but I like my private stuff staying private.

• KMail can search too, and works faster.

• I don't like things changing without my control, I'll update when I want.

• I hate HTML email and graphics, and never get any mail that uses it.

• I prefer having my data safely at home, on my RAID-1, backed up daily to tape, rather than to depend on an external service for which I'm one among millions.

• It doesn't support gpg.

• It doesn't have imap.

• Weak filtering. No procmail.

• It's not possible to filter out parts of messages, such as stripping the ads added by various free mail services.

• It's not possible to implement cron jobs that archive/remove old junk.

• Konqueror isn't fully supported. I almost never use Firefox.

• My mail doesn't stop being available if my connection goes down.

Outlook is where its at

[MooseTick]

I was a big pine user until my hi-tech friend turned me on to this undergrould email client called outlook. It is sweet. It runs on nearly any OS(MS based) and is free(with purchase of MS office). I use it daily. If I get stuck there is even a cool paperclip dude who helps me out!

Re:Outlook is where its at

[Proto-Squirrel]

Bell, Book and Candle!

Re:Outlook is where its at

[wk633]

Outlook is also superior for auto-installation of help apps. With pine or gmail you have to download and run that attachment or word macro. Outlook does all that for you, although that feature is a little more limitted in recent versions.

Re:Outlook is where its at

[welshie]

nice. Auto-installation of malware. Yeah, go off and run random code in, or referred to, by an unsolicited email message, without user intervention.

er

[Anonymous Coward]

can't you use pine with gmail's POP3 option?

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

That was quick. =)

Liar

[Anonymous Coward]

Loads of places have blockers on for web mail.

This article is just an ad for goodle

WTF?

[cp.tar]

Whatever I type into googlefight, I get a tie.

Both contestants get 0 results. No matter what I try.

Re:WTF?

[McCarrum]

:/ Same! ZOMGWTFBBQ!?!1

Pine is junk

[d_jedi]

I've used it. Not impressed by any means.
It's a full featured e-mail client.. from the '80s. Sorry, it just doesn't cut it nowadays.

Wouldn't that hurt?

[gujo-odori]

I was once bombarded with dirt clods by some kids in the neighborhood, and they stung. Considering that most people have a far greater mass than a dirt clod, wouldn't being bombarded with people really hurt and possibly cause serious injury or death?

Now, if you were bombarded by people telling you how great gmail was, that would be something else again...

This guy works for Google?

[dR.fuZZo]

I often find it strange when folks post articles online about the company they work for. Unless you're anonymous, an executive, or in the PR dept, is your company going to want you sending out reviews of their products?

(I don't know who this guy is, and the site is Slashdotted.)

apples and oranges

[posterlogo]

Can't RTFA since the server is a little sluggish. But if I remember correctly, back when I used pine (~10 years ago)... it was pretty much just plain text. Has something changed since then? I don't think it compares at all to recent e-mail clients, or web-based clients like gmail. Also, you can't necessarily get ssh access everywhere to be able to use pine.

Anyone who hates the mouse automatically loses

[sycomonkey]

This isn't 1976, you're not sitting at a dumb terminal hooked up to a mainframe. It's '06, we have graphical user interfaces, in fact we're probably only a few years away from functional 3D GUI's, and you don't like mice.

WTF.

Re:Anyone who hates the mouse automatically loses

[MrP-(at work)]

Mice have their uses.. I mean I can't edit photos in photoshop with my keyboard.. But for file management and stuff like that, give me a console over drag'n'drop any day.

Re:Anyone who hates the mouse automatically loses

[Ekarderif]

We also have drag and drop programming interfaces from Microsoft. But that's not the point.

With my little vi, I can manage huge amounts of text with a stroke of a few keys. While you're fiddling through menus looking for the find box, I can just hit /. (Uh... no pun intended... that was suppose to be a period.) Keyboard shortcuts remain for a reason: they're faster. Instead of highlighting (and unhighlighting and rehighlighting because Office likes to be sticky on words) and hitting delete, I can just hit cFe without ever leaving the keyboard.

Of course, I don't mean just in a vi sense. I'm sure Emacs also has some quality LCTRL-C-[TAB]-[ESC]-[Kitchen Sink] that'll do the same. Sure, the mouse is easier. But for the most part, the keyboard is faster.

Re:Anyone who hates the mouse automatically loses

[jonom]

I hate mice - I use a tablet now a lot of the time and find it much more comfortable.

Re:Anyone who hates the mouse automatically loses

[sycomonkey]

I think the issue here is that 95% of the time my hands aren't actually ON the keyboard, my left hand rests on my knee and my right hand is using the mouse. I sit up and type on the keyboard when needed, but I generally only use the mouse. It maybe be somewhat slower, but it's just how I roll.

Webmail is a technological step backwards

[Sloppy]

Any time I hear about people moving capabilities away from their 99% idle multi-gigaHertz machine to a central server so they can run a dumb client on that idle machine instead, I think, "Whaaa??" It's, um, an interesting economic decision.

But for email, the "whaaa??" turns into "Are you insane??" Even before the government got caught spying on citizens without warrants, giving them (or anyone else) a one-stop-shopping point for all their intercepts, was an unnecessary risk. Now it's just stupid, and not for "paranoid cypherpunks" but even for any average Joe who has opened a newspaper in the last few years. WTF are you people thinking? Start encrypting, and make them break into your home if they want to read your email. Give them a chance to get caught.

We should be moving away from these old-fashioned centralized servers, taking power for ourselves. C'mon, run smart a client that actually knows what it's working with (emails) rather than pretending everything is a web page, and let that 386SX be 97% idle instead of 99%.

Re:Webmail is a technological step backwards

[ryanov]

How about I get to keep my own machine and the other end pays for upgrades while I spend my money on booze? Sounds good to me.

Re:Webmail is a technological step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

even before the government got caught spying on citizens without warrants

Got caught?

I'm still amazed anybody was surprised by this. The Supreme Court declared it an inherent power of the Presidency to spy without warrants thirty fuckin' years ago, and every presidency since FISA was passed declared that FISA didn't affect its right to exercise that power, starting with Jimmy fuckin' Carter's. Everybody was talking about Echelon back in the 1990s. And the FISA Court of Review said, in the first case it ever decided, it was a "given" that FISA couldn't abridge that power. What the hell did you all think was going on?

I can just see it now. Next week, in the New York Times, "Federal Reserve Caught Issuing Currency Unbacked By Gold Without Warrants". Jesus, Americans are so fucking ignorant.

Re:Webmail is a technological step backwards

[hokeyru]

Dude, you have totally inspired me. Not only am I going to ditch third-party web-based email providers, but I'm also going to bury my private server in my basement under a concrete slab.

Re:Webmail is a technological step backwards

[tolonuga]

nah. think about email encryption/decryption, that is far too heavy on the cpu,
your 386SX won't do it nicely. so lets move the encryption/decryption to a central
server.

oops. wait. aehm. never mind.

Re:Webmail is a technological step backwards

[Kupek]

If anybody but those that know me read my Gmail account, they would be very, very bored. It's not worth the troulbe to encrypt my personal email. I don't gain any worthwhile "power" by using a fat email client.

I use Gmail for convenience. I can check my personal email from anywhere, home, office, friend's houses or public labs. There is no feature in a fat client that trumps that convenience.

Re:Webmail is a technological step backwards

[Sloppy]

If anybody but those that know me read my Gmail account, they would be very, very bored. It's not worth the troulbe to encrypt my personal email.

I understand what you mean; 99% of my email is boring and mundane too.

Then there's the other 1%, where somebody just doesn't think about what they may be revealing, or what the consequences could be if the information were shared with the whole world.

I once got a message (not even an email, but through a very untrustworthy/flakey website's messaging system) where my girlfriend gave her damn address and said the front door was unlocked. Nothing bad happened, of course (like 99.999% of the time) but it was an unnecessary risk.

If everyday Joe Schmoes (and Jane Schmoes) were in the habit of encrypting everything without worrying about if it was sensitive information or not, then we'de be better off. And attackers wouldn't know what messages they needed to try to crack, either -- they'de have to crack it all.

I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I finally got sick of using someone else's domain and went and registered my own domain as my two initials and last name. My Web hosting provider offers always-on SSL/TLS protected Webmail access and/or I can POP/IMAP my mail. I prefer Webmail since I can be anywhere and don't have to configure my mail to leave it on the server.
What I don't get is why more people don't do this. Money is not a real problem since I paid $44.00 for a 5-year registration and less than $50.00 for years worth of Web hosting that included email hosting. I get unlimited email accounts that can be up to 2GB a box. So, for less than a night on the town, I've hooked myself up for quite some time with a domain that is unique and can be used to market myself on resumes, etc.
Give it a thought. Why use someone elses domain and put up with their rules and ads and restrictions. Get your own little corner of the WWW and be your own man.

Re:I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can spend $0 if you use a decent linux distro combined with a dynamic dns service that offers a free system such as dyndns. Services like these can be updated via a little server application that checks your IP address every 15 minutes or so and updates as needed and chances are that any time you sit down to access your e-mail, the server will be up and accessable even on a dynamic ip.

Re:I don't get it...

[yourlord]

I can 1 up you. I got a static ip on my dsl and registered my own domain. I host it on a pentium 200 machine in my basement and run open webmail on it. I have webmail anywhere in the world hosted on my own server. I put up with noone elses crap for my webmail service.

Re:I don't get it...

[Wdomburg]

There are a ton of major mail services which completely disallow dynamic IP pools. In theory, I dislike this practice. In practice, I sympathize with people running professional mail servers.

Pine because CTU, Chloe, and Jack use it!

[antdude]

See here or here.

Actually, it was just one of Jack's foes using it. [grin]

Re:Apr. 5:Prostitute Schedule @ MBOT in San Franci

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike Las Vegas, San Francisco does not regulate prostitution. So, the MBOT heartily welcomes everyone -- including HIV-positive customers.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

1. In Nevada, brothels are legal in counties with a population less than 400,000. Actual licensing of the brothels is a matter for the county to handle.
2. Las Vegas is located in Clark County, which has a population around 1.7 million.
3. Prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas
4. Licensed brothel prostitutes must be checked weekly for STDs.
5. Customers are not tested for disease, though prostitutes will visually check for STDs.
6. Prostitution is unregulated (aka illegal) in San Francisco.
7. San Francisco prostitutes are not required to be tested for STDs.

YES!!!! NICE ONE TACO!!!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I like it :)

Seconded! Oh so seconded!!

Looks like they've finally taken everyone's advice and have gone trolling(good kind) in the Journals for some juicy stories. And lets face it, this story is what Slashdot is really all about. Pine Vs Gmail. Genius.

There is some danm good eatin' in the Journal section, and hopefully now a valuable resource won't be going to waste. I'm guessing some of the best stories will be coming out of the Journal's section, especially for "deep geek" stuff.

Encore! Encore!

Another Gmail Bonus

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about everyone else but I also like GMail because of the google personalized home. It's nice that everytime I open a browser I get my mail checked, can see the current news, and even what's up with /. not to mention the use of other RSS feeds. So pretty much with GMail + Google personalized home I can see about 50% of the information I usually want from the internet right away.

pine | jive

[Intellectual Elitist]

My mailreader of choice is Pine piped through "jive". It makes life so much more interesting...

Uh, Gmail can be used with Pine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, the article writer is referring to the interface itself, but, why do they consistantly act as if Pine can't be used with the Gmail service AT ALL? It can definitely be configured for it. Even I managed to do so once. Of course, the Gmail interface is pretty nice and I personally endorse it to family and friends as being very useful indeed, despite the fact that I still end up having to use the mouse a lot for it (it has a few keyboard shortcuts, but, they don't work right in Opera, and you can't do everything via shortcuts so it would mean a LOT of tabbing to use the keyboard all the time.)

Unwashed!

[teasea]

I'll switch. But I'm not taking a bath yet dammit!

Gmail's keyboard shortcuts have a long way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Pine's keyboard shortcuts rock. As a VIM user, I feel in gmail like I feel in MS Notepad: Why do I have to use the mouse to get things done?

For example, here's something that always happens when I use gmail:

I open my spam folder
I scan the subjects to see if anything that's not spam is in there
Nope, select all
Delete forever

But as luck would have it, Gmail doesn't have shortcuts for opening the spam folder, selecting all, or deleting.

In pine, I would type the following:

w s # w to search my directory names, "s" for the first letter in "spam", enter to go into the directory
s a # select all
a d # apply-to-selection delete, enter to confirm the operation

It may look a little cryptic (and you have to enable the apply-to-selection feature in your config) but PINE has prompts at the bottom of the screen reminding you of the shortcuts if you forget, and they're actually quite natural once you start using them. Although it's a 8 keystrokes (as opposed to 3 mouse clicks), you can type them very quickly.

I WORK AT GOOGLE = POOR BASTARD

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hear about your salary

Gmail - not everywhere

[MikePlacid]

Gmail failed to load on a browser that worked from TV set in my Las Vegas hotel room... Beware!

More Seahorse Coolness [Re:PGP?]

[codergeek42]

It also has a "Text Encryption" plugin for Gedit, which allows you to edit an OpenPGP message and encrypt, sign, verify a sig, or decrypt the current file contents. Rather useful. (Noted about this on my blog.)

Email clients are like shoes for me

[Anthony]

Some look nice but are uncomfortable. Some are hardy and last for ages, no matter what happens. Others just aren't my style. Rough chronology of Internet email clients:

• 1989 - mail(1)
• 1991 - elm
• 1995 - pine
• 1997 - NSMail
• 1997 - exmh
• 1998 - GNUS
• 2004 - mutt

I have also had to use MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, a mainframe email client at Amdahl Corp and DG's Office mail client at DG Corp. None of them are ideal as Internet mail is not their primary purpose. For instance, tracking headers is not straight-forward and GPG is not (easily) supported.

mutt has to be most dependable and flexible of these. I plan to go back to GNUS once I get around to replacing my useless "cheap" firewall/router and looking into problems I had with >10,000 messages.

MTU-related surfing problems

[Draconnery]

Just to speak up for "the other guy" -

there are definitely some little corners of the web where your MTU can matter. In fact, that's the first thing I thought of when reading this post, because of my own experience. My parents have DSL, and last year I spent a maddening day or two trying to figure out why Yahoo! webmail (and some credit card online payment sites?) wouldn't work for them. Had me super confused, the rest of the Internet worked, but not their webmail. After a great amount of annoyance, I found a forum where many people complained of the same problem, and someone eventually explained that if your MTU isn't set to 1492 like DSL uses, Yahoo! bonks. Fixed everything.

Sounds to me like that's a plausible explanation, I think the situation described by your parent post was similar - it was possible to log in, and see the main mail page (how many new messages there were in each folder, etc.), but as soon as you clicked "Inbox", it just couldn't get there.

That's all I got.

Re:MTU-related surfing problems

[edremy]

It can't be the MTU. This occurs in multiple locations, including my home DSL connection and my work which have nothing in common network wise. IE works fine- it's only the "good" browsers that fail. It also works perfectly in Firefox and Opera if I delete my cache- this is the recommended fix on the net, and while it works it's a royal pain to dump cache every time I want to view my mail.

It's something with the way Javascript is written for the site, and it's really really irritating.

Re:MTU-related surfing problems

[Draconnery]

Alright, that's fair. I just didn't want the post between ours to get away with claiming that MTU can't affect anything when you're "just surfing."

Also, that blows bigtime.

Loss of Privacy - Current scourge of the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

In this digital age, information is the most valuable asset. People think that a small gain in convenience is more important than a total loss of privacy.

An email I send to my wife with a powerpoint presentation on Telemarketing, shows me ads for telemarketing opportunities at my place. Sure it will help me if I was into telemarketing. (But I was forwarding a review copy of her MBA presentation). But should a casual private exchange of data or information between two people be out there for some corportion to data mine?

Searching for data. Do you really have gigabytes of personal email that you ever care to search through. IF you want to search through some mailing lists, use google for that. But do you want to band it together with your personal mail for searching?

Convenience/Speed: putty.exe can be downloaded and run in less than opening a web mail page. So if you are a technical person with access to a shell account, wouldn't that be a much better option than giving free access to all your data to a corporation, who are in this just for the money.

When someone can successfully convince you that they are doing everything for you rather than for themselves, they have won. How many people really believe that "Do no Evil" slogan is more to convince you rather than their philosophy.

Before Google came along, many people got along fine without having a 2GB email account. And even now how many people have more than 100 MB of personal email that they really need to keep forever?

Can you not use both?

[johansalk]

Can you not download your gmail email with pine, and use the webmail away from home?

Re:Can you not use both?

[ErisCalmsme]

I found that it was easier for me to configure mutt to do just that. I was actually using mutt and msmtp on my zaurus to read all the mail from my various accounts for a while. Then I decided I wanted to see graphics people sent me (without a separate app) so now I read my gmail with Mail.app ;)

Why gmail at all? because I use it for mailing lists that are publicly archived anyway so I don't care if they read all of it. There's enough space for me to subscribe to 10+ mailing lists and never have to worry about filling my box. Plus if I want to search for something I know that I have my own private archive of all the mailing lists that I subscribe to.

rub it in....

[tscheez]

why dont you. seriously, we're all really happy you work at google

Apples vs. Oranges

[espo812]

Stay tuned for the article on apples versus oranges. While many like the thick orange skin, record numbers are switching to the soft red skin of an apple.

Seriously, GMail and Pine do totally different things. What's the point?

subpoena

[Anonymous Coward]

In exchange you give Google access to your e-mail if at least for ads, and in addition to had over upon subpoena.

Google's ads have never bothered me, and I'm downright touchy about ads. They also provide a small selection of related web-search or news results on the side, and I've found these interesting from time to time. As for the subpoena thing, I greatly appreciate that Google's legal department is handling subpoenae for me, as it would be a most vexing experience to be on the receiving end of a subpoena. They also seem willing to challenge over-broad subpoenae in court, which is more than I could do.

Never use gmail: stores data in perpetuity.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll never EVER use gmail again, now that we know that they store *each and every* single piece of data they have in perpetuity, even if mails are deleted by users. Thank you very much but I value my privacy.

One more key point - lack of security

[btarval]

There's one key point about gmail that you left out. You need to have an inherently insecure browser just to be able to use it. Specifically, it requires javascript, which has had terrible security issues over the years.

I presume you also need cookies as well, but I can't say, as I avoid gmail like the plague.

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail works without Javascript -- it just sends you to a non-Javascript version. It still requires cookies, though.

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[btarval]

Which interface would that be? From google's "about gmail" "quick facts" page at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html, they state:

"JavaScript and cookies must be enabled on all browsers"

Yahoo at least doesn't keep their non-javascript interface hidden; they switch to it dynamically once they detect your browser doesn't support javascript. That's how it should be if it's properly implemented. Plus they have a version of maps which doesn't require javascript either.

Clearly Yahoo has someone in charge there who actually does understand security, and takes it seriously. Google is (curiously and somewhat surprisingly) far behind in this regard.

Regarding C, there's a huge difference between placing trust in a remote server that I can't audit, and a simple local program that I can.

One is at their mercy when it comes to spyware should they change the definition of "no evil" in the future. The best that one can do is to audit what comes across the connection. Aside from being tedious, it's also after the fact.

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[blacksmith]

Yahoo at least doesn't keep their non-javascript interface hidden; they switch to it dynamically once they detect your browser doesn't support javascript. That's how it should be if it's properly implemented. Plus they have a version of maps which doesn't require javascript either.

Google has both those. If you use a non-supported browser, you get the simple mail interface. Likewise, you'll get the simple map interface if your browser is either not up to it or has script turned off.

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[adam.skinner]

There's one key point about javascript insecurity that you left out: it's relative only to the URL that you're dealing with. If you trust GMail to store your email, surely you can trust them not to expliot javascript insecurity in a malicious way. The same reasoning applies to cookies.

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[brainburger]

Sorry to appear pedantic, but I always see Google's motto quoted as "Do no evil". This is wrong, the motto is "Don't be evil". This means apart from not appreciating Google's joke, people sometimes get surprised when Google seem to do little evil things. - actually some little evil things might not be against their policy, as it is the overall evil-rating of the company that matters. (I think allowing blocking of certain search-terms in Google China is a good example of this - the net effect of this agreement being that Chinese people get easier access to a massive quantity of info that they wouldn't have had without Google).

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[shellbeach]

Which interface would that be?

The one the parent post referred to. If you actually used Gmail, you'd find out too.

Gmail's behaviour is exactly like Yahoo's - if the browser doesn't support javascript, you're automatically switched to the HTML only interface. You can quite happily fire up lynx pointed to https://gmail.google.com/ and read your Gmail ...

Furthermore, your concerns about being able to read the source of PINE but not Gmail are unfounded: you can actually view the entire Gmail client-side javascript if you want (which is exactly how the libgmail and gmail-API projects were developed ...)

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[btarval]

Thanks for the clarification; I appreciate the information. I'll take your word on it, and gratefully stand corrected on the point.

However, there is a big diffeence between claiming something which "is required", and something which may work. My experience with Yahoo is that they stand behind their non-js version.

Regarding the non-js version of maps, this must be since their initial release. It didn't work when I first tried it out, and I haven't bothered with it since. I am delighted to hear that it does now.

And no, I don't trust Yahoo to do anything more than what most other businesses would do. I do trust them slightly more than Google, since they haven't required tracking my social networks via invites to get started with things. That is just plain sureptitious and dishonest.

As far as "most of us trust google", forgive me, but most people surf with js turned on, along with other worse things; and really haven't a clue about security (though again, many people think they do). A case in point is your claim about "As is the nature of every web based email system.". Sorry, that's just wrong. Please show me an attack vector to install spyware (or just do a buffer overflow) via plain html with standard browsers that have javascript turned off.

Regarding your final question, yes, I do audit the source code that I use. Your statement about "remote being better" indicates you neither really understand security, nor are concerned about it. With all due respect.

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[btarval]

"Javascript has never had the issues of being able to install files on the local machine, or anything similar, that's all done via activeX which is why the mozilla family of browsers is safe from this vector. So far, the worse JS security issues is that it can popup a billion windows and kill a machine."

No, with all due respect, you are very much mistaken. Javascript has had horrible security issues, which keep popping up (pun intended). Not quite as bad as MS Windows, but certainly a contender.

"Show me an attack vector that works with just javascript."

Ok, since you didn't qualify your statement, here are a few from a quick google search, since I'm lazy. Note the email-related ones. Study the issues around javascript (including its architecture) if you want more information.

http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9704/ 0016.html
http://www.peacefire.org/security/hmattach/
http://esj.com/security/article.asp?EditorialsID=8 95
http://www.opera.com/support/search/supsearch.dml? index=781

"but for the adverage person, remote is better"

I've already mentioned that what most people do leaves them open. Most people don't understand security. And most people really don't care. Your original question was directed towards myself. Anyone calling themselves a security expert who blindly lives by depending on remote maintainence is one who is an easy target. Knowledgeable users know how to protect themselves. And the best actually do, since the loss of reputation capital is significant (see how Kevin Mitnick got taken down the last time).

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[btarval]

I guess we'll have to disagree on the seriousness of the attacks. You can downplay them all you want, but most people in this business take them seriously.

If you're interested in attacks which leave your files exposed, just do a google search for "javascript buffer overflow". I got 629,00 hits. And yes, this stuff is still occurring.

You can also downplay things by trying to pin the blame on the implementation. That doesn't mitigate things when they happen (have you ever had to clean up these messes?). If things were done cleanly, then JS issues wouldn't be a constant, reoccurring theme for the past 10 years or so.

The point remains that JS is a weakpoint. If you had the OpenBSD folks (or even people with their attitude) in charge of things, then the situation might change. But until that time, the fact is that you are safer surfing with it turned off, and not on.

Re:One more key point - lack of security

[rtb61]

Actually google seems to be drifting more to "don't be seen to be evil", marketing and profits.

pine can use alternate editors

[barutanseijin]

Pico is the default, but you can configure pine to use another editor, vi, emacs, ed or whatever. Just say yes to the enable-alternate-editor option in .pinerec.

Gmail macros scripts fixes most of the negatives

[grayrest]

snarfed found a bunch of greasemonkey scripts but he missed the important ones, which are at persistent.info. In particular, he'd probably be interested in:

http://persistent.info/archives/2006/03/21/gmail-m acros

and

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gmail/hack-atta ck-become-a-gmail-master-161399.php

This post deals with my version of the macros script:

http://gr.ayre.st/~grayrest/greasemonkey/gmail/gma il-macros.user.js

* Filtering has a great UI, but it's horribly weak.
Agreed.

* There's no way to bounce an email. This should be pretty trivial to add.
dontcare

* If no email is selected, the Y key should archive the email under the cursor. This should be common sense.
This isn't part of the macros script, but it wouldn't be that hard to add. I don't usually archive one mail at a time, so this doesn't really bother me.

* You can't automatically create a filter based on an email. Why not?
Agreed. Even better, I'd appreciate mailing list support so that I could get rid of most of my tags.

* You can search, but you can't select messages based on headers, subject, or body text. Worse, if you have more messages than fit on the screen, you can't select any messages that aren't on the screen. If you ever get flooded with email, or with spam that escapes the spam filters, god help you.

Again, search is your friend. If you have my version of the macros script, 'mat' on the results repeatedly.

* Thank god there are keyboard shortcuts...but there aren't nearly enough! I don't mind using the mouse for one-time stuff, but if i have to use it often during my normal email routine, that's a deal breaker. Keyboard shortcuts for go to label, go to sent mail/drafts, and select all/none/unread would be necessary if I was ever to go back to Gmail.

go to label: g+label
go to sent: g+sent
go to drafts: g+drafts
select: m + (a all, n none, u unread, s starred, t unstarred)
apply label: l+label

* Marking messages as read is impossible with the keyboard

'r'

additionally, mark as unread

'v'

* Selecting a message doesn't automatically move the cursor to the next message. This is just plain silly.
Again, not there, but simple to add to the script. I don't usually mark one message at a time...

* The Y key is horribly inconsistent. If you're in the Inbox, it archives. If you're in a label, it removes the label. If you're in spam or trash, it moves to the Inbox! This is a bad case of modal input.

'e' always removes from inbox.

* Gmail might be smart about (not) displaying quoted text, but it can't handle composing with quoted text to save its life.

Agreed but I don't find it difficult to manually remove quoted text.

Author made a mistake

[mpotratz]

The author says there is no "or" or "not" filter in gmail. There is at least an "or" in the gmail filter, I'm currently using it. It is the double bar "||" like in some programming languages for example:

"me@somewhere.com || you@someplace.com || them@thatplace.com"

--Mike

heh... don't trust Gmail

[everphilski]

check this out

gMail saves your emails after you delete them. Even if you use IMAP. Other ISP's do NOT. See, Google is in the business of using your personal information to make money, and by saving it long enough and aggregating it they can see trends and make money.

I don't run my own web server but I have the next best thing - a good friend who is. And I know his email volume, he doesn't back up emails (most ISP's don't, google is the exception - remember advertising is their lifeblood) so when I delte them they are gone.

Be wary of google. They want to index the world's knowlege, they want to aggregate your life - make sure you want to give it up to them.

Re:heh... don't trust Gmail

[Hydroksyde]

gMail saves your emails after you delete them. Even if you use IMAP. Other ISP's do NOT. Bullshit. Any ISP worth it's salt makes a backup of their e-mail system, usually to a tape. Tapes are sequential access media, and often stored away from the machine they were written in. This means in order to properly delete an e-mail message, the following steps would be required

1. Delete from the main server (easy)
2. Locate all backups. This would mean finding out which tapes the e-mail is actually stored on, and retrieving them (Some would likely be stored offsite, incase of fire or other catastrophic event
3. Extract all files from tapes, remove the particular file, and rewrite the entire tape
4. Return all tapes to their proper location

This could take well over an hour for a small ISP, and of course this puts the backups themselves at risk... Consider how many people delete messages in g-mail. The fact that google mentions this in their ToS is probably just covering their asses.

Re:heh... don't trust Gmail

[Bert64]

All free email providers keep your mail... You really think yahoo or hotmail are any different?
At least google are up front about it... These services are not free, your just paying for the service with a method other than money.
If you want a mail service that doesn't log your mail or try to sell you advertising, then you can pay for it directly using money instead.

Re:heh... don't trust Gmail

[kkiller]

I don't run my own web server but I have the next best thing - a good friend who is. You have a good friend who is a web server?

Re:heh... don't trust Gmail

[Hydroksyde]

Next they'll say their boyfriend/girlfriend is a firewall...

Re:heh... don't trust Gmail

[Nazo-San]

I'd like to add to this note about e-mails not really being deleted when you hit delete that, in fact, the same applies to Pine/etc on your local system. If the government came after you and subpoenad (sp?) your harddrive, they can see up to the last ten deletions worth of data (probably not quite that much, but, I'm betting you don't end up overwriting the old deletions that often.) Again, like so many keep trying to say, if you are that worried about security, stop using an inherantly unsecure unecrypted and very ancient messaging service! E-mail wasn't DESIGNED for sensitive stuff, it was designed to help businesses coordinate (there was practically no such thing as a home user when they created the standards and such, and home user on the internet was inconceivable.)

Re:heh... don't trust Gmail

[everphilski]

Bullshit. Any ISP worth it's salt makes a backup of their e-mail system, usually to a tape.

I take it you've worked for every ISP worth their salt? I've worked for a couple ISP's, most don't ...

Re:heh... don't trust Gmail

[Hydroksyde]

Ok, maybe you're right, but what happens if that data gets lost? I suppose it's fine on a system where e-mail is taken off the server by a POP client, but for a webmail system (like gmail) where messages are stored remotely, it is important.

Personal Preference

[Sentri]

Some people prefer A, some people prefer B. trying to convince people using rational arguments to change something they like or have grown deeply accustomed too usually results in them digging their heels in and sticking to their preferred thing.

On another level what is going on here is the CLI versus GUI debate on another level, a very interesting essay on which can be found here http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

I recommend giving it a read.

Remember, different is not necessarily bad, its just not the 'good' you are used to. Learn to tell the difference.

Why?

[Penguinoflight]

Obviously its because all the google developers are using pine... duh.

Tell them you'd use BOTH if gmail supported IMAP

[OrangeTide]

Gmail only allows POP3 clients, so you could use both (but painfully). If Gmail supported IMAP you could use Pine and transparently jump into a browser and use the webUI when you are away from Pine. Also Mutt is slightly better than Pine (in terms of features and keyboard friendliness).

as much as he likes text, he cant use it

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy works for Google? He needs to remember to recheck his sentences after he corrects them, or at least make sure he has an entire thought finished before he writes another sentence.

"Gmail is smart about hiding quoted text and emails i've seen."

Oh, have you now? Maybe this sentence could work if it had a comma, but I know it's not what you really meant.

"The killer feature is that the bodies of all messages in the thread on a single screen."

...

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bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail is for mailing lists, full-stop.

I can't see much else to it, that you don't have with any other mailreader. (modulo the hype, of course)

Sure, Webmail sucks, but PINE? Seriously?

[nosferatu-man]

PINE blows. If you're going to use a client, use useful one.

Err!

[kadnan]

URL is not working: HTTP ERROR: 503 Startup+in+progress%2C+please+wait+%2E%2E%2E RequestURI=/space/gmail+vs+pine Powered by Jetty:// P.S: atleast I found out about Jetty:// :>

No Internet = No Gmail

[layer3switch]

http://snarfed.org/space/gmail+vs+pine
As of 02:12 AM EST US
HTTP ERROR: 503 Startup+in+progress%2C+please+wait+%2E%2E%2E

RequestURI=/space/gmail+vs+pine

This is why I don't use Gmail. Case closed.

No Internet Access and/or No Gmail Service Available = No Gmail = Unable to read email messages/headers
No Internet Access and/or No IMAP Service Available = Pine IMAP Header/Body Cache = Read old email messages/headers

I use LiveMail

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Live Mail - it's 100 times better than Google in every respect.

this wont ever be seen because of my karma

[elmuhfuh]

what i like about gmail is the fact that it uses labels rather than folders to organize mail. you can assign more than one label if its applicable to an email. for example if you have a folder called 'work' and one called 'finance' and your hr manager emails you some information about your 401k you might would want to store it in both folders, but with a folder structure that would require two copies in two different locations. labels solves that problem. when i use this argument people often ask me how often the two label to one email applies. it actually applies more than youd think but i like to keep my email very organized.

Top-posting

[chrysalis]

Gmail forces you to reply with Outlook style.
Having answers before questions in emails pisses me off, this is the main reason I use Mutt over Gmail.

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Point for Pine

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

You can use a native app, even when the website in question. is. being. slashdotted.

Now, everybody be thankful that the /. post only linked to the Pine-vs-GMail article, not to GMail itself.

what's so great about pine?

[sentientbrendan]

Can't say I'm impressed with the UI... looks like the pico of email emailers.

Conversation view

[Bombula]

I like Gmail, and the conversations view is a pretty intuitive method of organization, but I have to confess I get irritated not being able to switch to a chronological or other category-sorted view with the click of a button. To Google's credit, I submitted feedback to that effect and was pleased to see it was one of the commonly-requested features, so hopefully we'll see that functionality in upcoming versions.

Unicode?

[mpiktas]

Correct me if I am wrong, but did pine use to support only us-ascii encoding? If it is true, then it does not even qualify for a name of an email client. Shortcuts, shmortcuts, if I see giberish on the screen instead of my mail, how does it help me?

No fixed font in Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no (easy) way to display the text-only e-mails with a fixed font (you can use a newer version of Mozilla Firefox with some extension added). This has been asked for several times on discussion groups or directly to Google but without any response.

Using Gmail for patch exchanging with some open source projects is really difficult because the patches are unreadable with a variable font.

Re:Sure, Webmail sucks, but PINE? Seriously?

[maccallr]

Or emacs vm mode which I found a bit less scary than gnus. Under X11 it's a dream to use (multiple virtual folders, unfinished replies etc), and for remote access without X11 it's absolutely fine. I've used it for probably 10 years now (although I use Gmail every day for non-work stuff!). It's almost certainly only of interest to the seasoned emacs user though.

What about GMail and Pine?

[spaceturtle]

I use a Pine (well mutt actually) and GMail. At home I download the mail using mutt. At uni I use the GMail interface. This allows me to access my mail without having to somehow set up a SSH server, when my ISP appears to be firewalling me.

Also, as each has their strengths, by using *both* I double by productivity. Well, not quite. but I do like both of them. :)

It's the Port 80 thing, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever try to SSH (or telnet) through the average corporate firewall to get to PINE? Gmail is ubiquitous because port 80 is open everywhere. From the desk where I now sit I can reach Gmail (or Yahoo mail) but can't get through the firewall for a SSH connection. No POP, SMTP, SSH, telnet, ftp gets through the firewall. But squeeze that same functionality through port 80 and you can do what you want.

Next up...

[franksands]

Eclipse vs. Vi, the combat of the century.

Why people keep comparing apples and oranges? The main difference between PINE and Gmail is that the latter has a graphic interface. People should use whatever works best for them.

As a gmail user

[Nonillion]

I am very much like the poster, I use console based e-mail clients like pine; and good olde fashioned command line mail. I normally don't like web based e-mail. Stuff like hotmail are way over guified; that's why I like gmail, lean, fast and very reasonable storage space. However, I will still use pine and command line e-mail for all my stuff I don't want prying eyes to look at.

Fingerprint copies

[SeanDuggan]

Hope you've memorized your fingerprint, or at least carry around a copy of it.
I used to carry exact representations of all of my fingerprints until I realized what a security risk that was. Ten minutes with a hot stove and I'm once again risk free. Awfully hard to hold onto slick surfaces, though...

This is like Netscape vs IIS...

[argent]

GMAIL vs PINE?

One's a mail server that includes a web interface.

One's a mail client that you can use with the server.

Comparing GMAIL and PINE is like comparing a web browser with a web server.

Mobile Computing

[EXTomar]

On the other hand, if current trends continue for mobile computing then you want your email on a machine you can access anywhere. Since most people can't afford to host their own email server, this is where Gmail and the like come in. They'll host it for you to access from anywhere.

Its all well and good to say "its in expensive, better, whatever to use your own mail storage" it doesn't mean a lot to many people if they can't look check it while standing in a line at Starbucks. Whether or not trends in mobile computing are good is a discussion for another day but to dismiss centralize storage is "backwards" is misplaced and at worse "tinfoil hat"-ish since email was never meant as a secured means of communication any more than a postcard is secured (read: if one believes they have super important information that needs to stay super secret they aren't touching email as a transport anyway). There are good reasons to centralize and disperse storage where both schemes have their bonus and drawbacks.

The best solution is to have both. One should have some email addresses that are only accessible from home and others from anywhere and give out email appropriately.

migrating for hotmail to gmail

[paco3791]

I also resisted making the switch. I had both for a while and prefered the gmail interface but couldn't find any good way to transfer my existing emails from hotmail to gmail, along with the general pain it is to try and get everyone I know switched over to my new email address.

But I recently solved both problems with a great little program I found. http://www.e-eeasy.com/GetMail.aspx/ Getmail forwarded all of my existing emails to my gmail account automagically, it would have taken me days of work to do it through hotmail as there is no option to mass forward messages. And it continues to forward any messages that come to my old hotmail address. I log in maybe once a week to check my junk folder and thats it.

I can't tell you how happy I am having finally made the full switch. The ads and interface of hotmail were just driving me crazy, and the search and storage features of gmail are great. Getmail eased the process and I highly recomend this slick little free program.

Any device is subject to subpoena

[gammoth]

Email stored anywhere is subject to subpoena. I guess there's some safety if your running your own email server--you can delete incriminating emails. But for many of us, even the technically inclined, we're short on hours in the day as it is and we don't want more admin responsibilities.

I just don't want people to get the impression that it's only Google that's holding on to your emails. There are copies of your email on servers all over the globe, some persisting longer than others. And even if your careful with you're email server, you have no control over replies you've sent, except to not use the reply, or configure to not copy original content, or carefully delete unwanted material.

Step forward

[gammoth]

Thanks for adding a bit of sanity to the discussion. I get bored reading my own email!

Re:Step forward

[Reservoir Penguin]

So can I have your google id and pass? I promise not to delete anything, just relax reading it for a while, sipping on a cup of coffee.

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Web Based Email Is Inconvenient

[kmhebert]

I am a PINE user. In fact I am really dedicated to using PINE. When I switched ISPs I made sure I could get shell access via SSH and email access using PINE. I also have GMail and Yahoo! accounts plus Outlook for my work email but none of these come anywhere close to the convenience of PINE. The big advantage over web email is that, to for example bring up the next email in a folder, I just press "n". It comes up almost instantly. To look at the next email in GMail, you have to wait for a full page load! It takes SO much lomger that if you get a lot of emails you spend a huge percentage of your time just waiting for the browser. This minor yet extremely annoying inconvenience is the #1 reason I use PINE instead of any web-based email.

I used pine from 1992-2004 then switched to gmail.

[ClioCJS]

And I've never been happier.

Of course, I can still login to my machine and view my inbox with pine. It probably has 10,000+ messages in it right now :) I set up a procmail replication filter to replicate the emails to gmail.

In case I ever change my mind, I can go back.

If anyone needs an addressbook converter, I wrote one in Perl.

Gmail kicks ass and I wouldn't dream of going back to pine-only unless I had to. But the backup has come in handy when I've accidentally deleted (really deleted) a recruiter message that was in my spambox. . .

how about ZOE?

[coquelicot]

I'm using ZOE which is collecting & indexing emails for me. You can make it run via SSL, it runs Java. Works pretty well.

Pine Is Not Elm

[rapier1]

I think it simportant to remember something in all of this. The best software is *not* the one that has the keenest features or best this or superior other things. The best software is the one you are personally comfortable with. I can imagine why anyone would use vi when emacs is available. However, lots of people *love* vi. I can't stand it personally so for me emacs is superior. For mail I use pine for personal mail - its fast, lightweight, and lets me do everything I want to. I use gmail for mailing lists and for websites that insist I give them an email address. For work mail I use thunderbird. Each has its advantages in different contexts and so, for me, none of them is *best*. Each shines in a specific area but there is now overall winner. One thing I really like about pine that will never be availabe in gmail? The ability to grep/less/cat through a collection of messages or pipe them easily into a perl script or easily gzip and drop them all on a cd for archiving. Its nice but its soemthgin I care about that others don't.

Encryption?

[topher1kenobe]

One of the biggest things I see holding back webmail from serious use is encryption. I haven't yet thought of a way pgp would work without exposing your secret key to far too many places, and anytime someone else controls your security, they can open it up at any time.

I use gpg in Pine a LOT, passing passwd's between co-workers, discussing sensitive stuff, etc. It's not currently possible to do that with web based email.

Business Judgement Rule

[Steve Hamlin]

The other poster already mentioned it, but I'll also chime in with a prior post of mine

---

The Board of Directors, and Management, DO have a responsibility to act in the best interests of shareholders, see Fiduciary Duty.

However, NOT to the extent that they must pursue every market in every industry in the world, at the expense of everything else.

The Business Judgement Rule normally protects the Board and Management from lawsuits about normal business decisions, such as:

Hypo_Director: "should we go into China knowing the upside for immediate growth and the potential downside for long-term corporate image problems? No, I don't think we should."

No way you a shareholder could sue over that. You certainly could try to vote in a new Board of Directors who are committed to expansion in China, but that is not the same as suing the Board for violating their duty.

---

Generally, the BJR says that as long as directors are informed and don't have conflicts of interest, theay are not civilly liable for business decisions that shareholders make disagree with. Of course, this does not apply to fraud, criminal acts, civil torts, etc.

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Your inherent l33tness will protect you

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't worry about having an unpatched kernel, your aura of superiority will certainly deflect any attacks. I would just go ahead and disable the firewall completely.

All e-mail users the world over could certainly learn a thing or two about redundancy and reliability from your l33t setup there. Hell, since your setup is better than Gmail the hundreds of brilliant minds at Google should be swarming all over your "500 day uptime" mega-box.

Gmail and Pine, sittin' in a tree

[Chronus]

Someone prolly already pointed this out, but can't you use pine to access gmail?
The best, and worst, of both worlds.

Havin' said that, I used to use pine and now use gmail 'cause I'm lazy. Yay slackers.

I prefer FastMail

[MLease]

I can use FastMail anywhere I can fire up a web browser, too. But it also allows me to use an IMAP client (or a POP client, but only for paid subscribers) as well. There may be some advantages to GMail, but after trying it out a few months ago, I decided to stick with FastMail and use Thunderbird to read it. If you'd like to check it out, go here (disclosure: this is a referral link; if someone opens a paid account, or a guest account that is later upgraded, I get a small credit toward my own account -- if you don't like me enough to do that [sniffle], you can just browse to www.fastmail.fm, too).

-Mike

web mail clients

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Pine in college and loved it. I use Gmail now for distribution lists, and think it's great. For heavy processing of personal mail, though, I'd love to see them incorporate even more Ajax/DHTML functionality and get closer to approximating real native app-type functionality.

As an example: http://ocswebdemo.oracle.com/ . Click on the "Launch Demo" button to see an even more full-featured web client.

disclaimer: I'm on the team that created this client

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv6 is still in the coming. Until then, how easy do you think it will be for most people to set up their own mail server?

Jumped the shark

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has jumped the shark.