Slashdot Mirror
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."
It can be used anywhere, without needing to install anything. I like some IMAP clients, but this is why I chose Gmail over them.
Perhaps google pages would have been a better hosting choice for a story that appears on slashdot. I can't even load the page.
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)!
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?
Transistors and Beer!!
Interesting story, but I think I'll stick with Pine until Google have finished the beta testing stage
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.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
? &compare_sites=digg.com&y=r&q=&url=slashdot.org
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
liqbase
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.
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.
Using this logic GMail should be disposed of for Yahoo, which had about 6x the number of results.
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.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
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.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
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.
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:
/bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
with apologies to whoever created this.
Sounds like a very diplomatic outcome on his part.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
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.
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.
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".
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.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
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.)
-- dR.fuZZo
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.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
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%.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ah, but will the things that aren't incriminating today always remain so? Therein lies the rub.
Is it fascism yet?
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?
espo
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.
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.
I presume you also need cookies as well, but I can't say, as I avoid gmail like the plague.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
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)