Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

[Posted January 4, 2007 by cook]

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier reviews a number of text-based email clients in a Linux.com article. "Lately, I've been pining for the simplicity of a text email client. Though Sylpheed has been a reliable workhorse, I decided to survey today's text email clients to see if I should go back to reading email in an xterm. I tested Pine, Cone, Mutt, and nmh to see if any of them were up to the task. For my use, Mutt came out on top, but Pine is also a reasonable alternative if you don't mind the licensing. In compiling my list of test candidates, I tried to be as complete as possible while including packages that are still maintained and require less than heroic efforts to obtain and use."

to post comments

Alpine

Posted Jan 4, 2007 17:04 UTC (Thu) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] (3 responses)

Recently (yesterday I think) the debian archive just saw the introduction
of "alpine", an apache-licenced pine. Seems exactely what the article's
author is looking for.

Alpine

Posted Jan 5, 2007 15:32 UTC (Fri) by charlieb (guest, #23340) [Link] (2 responses)

Sounds great, but Alpine appears to still be vaporware at present (unless you are an alpha tester).

http://www.washington.edu/alpine/

Alpine

Posted Jan 5, 2007 16:41 UTC (Fri) by lacostej (guest, #2760) [Link]

http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/alpine.html

http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/alpine/news/20070101T2350...

As long as an alpha tester got access to it, if the license was Apache, I don't think anything could prevent him from putting it into debian

Alpine

Posted Jan 5, 2007 16:45 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

They certainly don't hide it from the rest of us. I had no problem downloading and compiling it.

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 4, 2007 17:47 UTC (Thu) by SiB (subscriber, #4048) [Link]

How about gnus?

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 4, 2007 17:50 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link]

i am currently a satisfied mutt user, using it to connect via imap/ssl to
fastmail.fm as my "protocol provider". getting your rc files right for mutt
can be a bit of a pain, but once its done i was fine. i use emacs as my
editor for composing messages with a mode defined to provide some tweaks.

i did try to go the gnus and/or vm route within emacs but after trying for
some time to get it to work correctly with imap/ssl, i gave up, i don't see
myself trying again unless i can more or less copy config files from
someone else who has it working, although vm served me well for years when
i pop'd off to a local spool file.

one thing i like in particular about a service like fastmail is that i can
use mutt where i have it installed, but should i be on a computer anywhere
else, i can simply use their web interface.

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 4, 2007 17:50 UTC (Thu) by michel (guest, #10186) [Link] (6 responses)

Does anyone know if any of these text based MUAs can be used together with a GUI based client. Pretty sure sylpheed can (I think it uses MH based file format), but I thought there is no HTML support in sylpheed, which for me is a non-starter.
It would be nice to use a GUI at my desk, and a text based client remotely, without keeping all my mail on the server.

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 4, 2007 17:57 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (3 responses)

why do you not want to keep messages on the server?

mutt has a header-cache patch that can be applied if you are one of those people who has a very large number of messages.

otherwise it seems the best solution is to keep mails in a local format, use whatever client you like at your desk, and then use ssh and mutt (or another text-based client) to access this remotely. your mail is inaccesible if you cannot access an ssh client on a remote machine you are on (airport kiosk, hotel system, etc). this is why i like imap.

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 4, 2007 19:24 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

why do you not want to keep messages on the server?

Last time I've tried pine with Exchange, it was slow. The other reason why I keep my mail locally is that pine just can't filter like procmail does.

Bye,NAR

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 4, 2007 20:12 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

take a look at popfile, it can be used to filter mail on an IMAP server (manual filtering with it's 'magnets' as well as the bayesian filtering to any number of folders)

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 4, 2007 20:17 UTC (Thu) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link]

Mutt with Cyrus is great. And server-side filtering in Cyrus with Sieve is both RFC'd and is about the only filtering system that I've worked with that has a better semantic understanding of email addresses in headers than the standard pattern matching of procmail or maildrop.

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 5, 2007 9:13 UTC (Fri) by james (guest, #1325) [Link]

Personally, I download e-mails to my computer and use Dovecot IMAP as the main way of accessing them, even from local programs. For Mutt, you can hardly tell the difference. Most other MUAs can happily deal with keeping mail on the IMAP "server".

That way, you can use mutt over SSH, or tunnel IMAP over SSH and use a local MUA.

James

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 5, 2007 16:08 UTC (Fri) by remijnj (guest, #5838) [Link]

I tested this in the past with KMail and Pine, which seemed to work after a little bit of tweaking with a symlink (iirc). Make a good backup of all your mail before you do this though. I'd also advise against running both at the same time.

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com) => Pine

Posted Jan 5, 2007 0:34 UTC (Fri) by barbara (guest, #3014) [Link] (1 responses)

From the article -- "You can configure Pine using setup menus -- which are
less intuitive than they could be, but they at least provide a full
listing of Pine's configuration options."

The configuration options are not hard to understand at all. However, if
the user does needs help, the context-sensitive help feature (type ?
anywhere) is the best I've ever seen.

Text email clients revisited (Linux.com) => Pine

Posted Jan 9, 2007 0:12 UTC (Tue) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link]

They are pretty awfull actually, back in 1996 there weren't that many options so it was pretty easy
to configure. But at the moment there are really to many options to make it "easy". Sure it's alot
better than "mail" ..