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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.
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.
0 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.
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=15
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
the article appears to be slashdotted already.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
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!!
* 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.
Heh ... you're using Pine? Real nerds just telnet to port 110.
</sarcasm>
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?
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.
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
>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.
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
Ah, but will the things that aren't incriminating today always remain so? Therein lies the rub.
Is it fascism yet?