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

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?

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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: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: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

[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.