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Patches For Pine Going Away
md8mart writes to let us know about the imminent shutdown of the site that distributes Pine patches. From the RSS feed of Patches for Pine we read the following bad news for all Pine users: "The Department of Mathematics of the University of Washington will close the account that hosts my Patches for Pine site. I would like to thank the Department of Mathematics for having hosted this site for so many years. I do not have current plans to move this site, but this site will disappear on December 15, 2006. Thank you to everyone who supported me by positive feedback and encouragement to do this work through the years. I will update this information as it becomes available."
It's time to upgrade to Mutt.
:wq
I sent him an email offering to host the site, we'll see what happens. I see patchesforpine.com is available (or was when this article was in "red" preview status). We'll see what happens; I can't see it being a huge load on my webhosts.
So.. why doesn't someone just take over and host it elsewhere?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
I also just sent him a hosting offer. And, I'm a professor in the University
of Washington math department!
-- William
I tried Mutt at some point, but I got frustrated at how much customization it would require to get working the way I like. It seemed like it would be easier for me to write my own mail client (as I've already worked with textmode interfaces and there are tons of libraries for the network side). Besides, after things like threaded view and maildir format came into Pine, I had no need feature-wise to use anything else but Pine.
IMHO, Pine has pretty good UI design in that it's quite easy and intuitive for beginners, but also quite customizable for experienced users. So as you grow into a power user, the software can grow with you. (It's a bit like learning Linux with a desktop environment, and gradually proceeding into deeper things like kernel hacking. Try doing the same with the beginner-only design of Windows.)
This is probably why Pine is still the recommended mail client in many universities. The only problem these days must be that text mode is often perceived as inherently difficult or outdated.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
But what if I don't want a GUI e-mail client? Sure I can afford the CPU usage, but I'd rather have something small that lives in an SSH window or can even be used on systems where X isn't installed. And most of the graphics sent to me in e-mails are either (a) spam or (b) crap like signatures. The other 1% I can view in webmail should I need to.
Pine is just useless, and it should be abandoned.
Useless how? It allows you to read e-mail and organize it into different folders. What else is needed? A decent search function would be nice, I'd admit, but it's nothing that can't be easily written. That's like saying a 1960s car is useless because it doesn't have power windows, A/C, or ABS brakes...
-b.
I don't have any particular gripes about pine. I've never used it.
Choice is good. How would the death of a project be good for someone who doesn't use it anyway?
As a system administrator, I frequently have to support crappy software and idiots, whether it's something one of my users has installed or something someone somewhere else has installed that one of my users is trying to communicate with. That said, there is a certain percentage of people out there using text based mail clients that do so because they are either too stupid or too stubborn to switch to a mail client that has the modern capabilities 90% of my users simply expect to exist for their recipients. This creates problems for me.
At any rate, my point is that, even as a non-user, there are many projects I have often wished would just die. You don't have to be a user of a particular piece of software for it to impact your life. Eg, everyone is impacted by things like Microsoft Office. Choice isn't necessarily bad, but bad choices are.
When it was first developed, it was simply called "pine", kind of as an homage to elm. Laurence had several backronyms floating around in his head, because people kept asking what "pine" stood for. So he usually told them the one he preferred, which was the one about how the word pine was a neologism. He did just make the word up, after all, and I think he liked the connotation with slightly deranged people.
Years later, UW came up with the news and email thing as the "official" acronym. But it's not what it realy stood for originally when the program was first developed.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Unfortunately, the author of Pine doesn't like a lot of patchs. He repeatedly refused SSL patches produced by others in favor of maintaining the intrenally published and not-to-be-published local version, he rejects the use of Maildir, and he insists that every file in the home directory of the associated uw-imapd IMAP server is a mail file, and rejects patches to store them in a local subdirectory instead. This caused endless problems with Netscape andn other IMAP clients running on the same machine as the mail server itself, as it recursed endlessly. And as near as I could tell, he kept deliberately re-writing the 10 lines or so of patchable code to *BREAK* published patches.
Coupled with the stapled on "we didn't mean it was OK to modify it and republish it, even though that's what the language said" as described at http://www.asty.org/articles/20010702pine.html, there's no reason to continue any support whatsoever of Pine.
Are you trolling?
You forget (or are unable to use) remote access, then. I can check and reply to email from almost any machine, without having to configure anything on the boxes, or store my email on them. I don't even need Internet access -- a dial-up will do. Or ssh in to my box from my PDA via bluetooth to my cell phone. I don't need a gui, but can use one when I want.
Manipulate? With pine, you can pipe messages to a command. Can you do that with Outlook? And once the email has been received, mine is kept in a standard format that allows manipulation by other programs. Is yours? If I need to search my mail, it takes less than a second to get results for several years worth of mail.
As for speed, single-key commands are always faster than clicking, the reason being very simple: You don't have to aim.
Another great benefit is that you won't be hit by any trojans or even web bugs confirming your email address to spammers.
Oh, and for spam, if a spam gets past the mail filters, I pipe it to spamassassin, and the spam will be learnt by the server, as well as reported to razor and others. This helps rejecting spam by bayesian rules before it hits my account. With Outlook, the best you can do is rejecting based on senders or keywords, after you get the mail.
I have both pine and Outlook. I use pine because it offers so much more than Outlook does, and much quicker.