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

[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

[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. :-)

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: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.

[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.