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.
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!!
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.
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?
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.
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?