[Gllug] Mail programs

[Richard Cohen]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, David Damerell wrote:

> On Friday, 12 Oct 2001, Richard Cohen wrote:
> >On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, David Damerell wrote:
> >>On Friday, 12 Oct 2001, Jonathan Dye wrote:
> >>>Having only used pine (and attempted to use emacs but didn't know where to
> >>>start) for email under unix I was wondering what anybody's recommendations
> >>>are for mail progs?
> >>Emacs VM - if you want something that's easy to use, not easy to learn.
> >Stick with Pine - if you want both.
>
> You misunderstand; easy to use - a much misused term - would imply a
> powerful mailreader with facilities to readily customize and expand
> aspects of its operation. Pine isn't it; you can't become a Pine
> expert, because after a day you already know everything there is.

I'll admit that Pine is not easily customisable, and the method for
extending it is pretty clunky - although both things are slowly improving as
Pine development progresses.  I will argue, however, that there are a *lot*
of partially-hidden features, which don't jump out at you until you reach a
certain barrier, at which point the answer is usually "tweak this option"
and things get better.  I have over 50 options (from the boolean option
list) set in my .pinerc, and many other settings which I've customised.

It isn't perfect, but it suits my needs better than anything else I've come
across.

Oh, and if VM requires me to use a single line of LISP to
use/extend/customise it, I reject it.  I think programming languages should
be used for building programs, not setting options in mail readers.  I don't
know if I would need LISP - this is just a guess...

Cheers
Richard



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