Some of you will know what the hell I’m talking about.
I’ve got tens of thousands of emails going back to 1994 and spread across dozens of local mbox-format folders. I access my inbox through IMAP. I access all of this through PINE.
The time has come to rip off this band-aid and migrate to something else.
That something else is gmail. Gmail has keyboard shortcuts. It would be a non-starter otherwise, as any PINE user will understand. If there’s something essential I need to do that I can’t do mouselessly, I will be disappointed, but so far it looks like that won’t be the case. I can keep my external email address on my emails (myname@myusualdomain), which was another requirement. Importing two decades of email history has been a chore and has taken all day, but I’m almost done. (Well, my old sent-mail will still be uploading for another several hours.) The nested labels in gmail makes this all pretty nice: all my old folders are just labels nested under one “old folders” label which I can leave un-expanded.
I make this move with mixed feelings, but it’s been overdue for some time. After looking through the gmail documentation, I’m pretty excited about getting back up to, and well beyond, the efficiency I had with PINE. (Don’t even ask how I handled attachments in PINE. Hackkkkkkkkky.)
Well, I don’t know what to say…
Leaving perfection for gmail. Nested folders doesn’t seem like sufficient compensation.
Of course there are still real programmers out there that are keeping the PINE flame burning (I am not one of them, but I know a couple). I do understand why you moved. But sent mail back to 1994? That seems a bit, obsessive.
Just don’t slip up and start sending html in emails. That is just tacky…
I know, I know. Hold me back, I dare you!! (The juxtaposition in the migration was that I’ve got several iDevices that I needed to configure to expose my desired email address.)
Ha! First setting I changed: “Plain text only”.
The 1994 wayback machine I’ve kept up is primarily one of nostalgia. A few months ago, when the migration writing was on the wall, I wrote a little script to graph my rate of emails, versus time, to different people in my life. It was a fascinating plot, with various life changes appearing through my communications (friends, significant others, family members…coming into and going out of my daily routine over the years).
Ah I migrated to alpine a while back. An improvement on pine, although similar. I can use zimbra (a web reader), but I just don’t like it as well. With photos and such, I do use zimbra. Ordinary attachments I save and download. I doubt I will change.
A friend of mine still uses something called mail. He can do nothing with attachments. I have even put entire pdf files into the body of an email and he deals with them. Graphics or anything really complicated I send to his wife. Now that is a real Luddite.
Pine is actually pretty much perfect as an e-mail client. Although we’ve been persuaded by years of saturation by Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, et cetera that what we need in an e-mail view is something capable of handling dynamic HTML, dancing GIFs, whistling audio, autospawning popup windows, nested folders, and annoying sounds to indicate when you have received new mail. The reality is that for the vast majority of actual communications, all you need is plain text and MIME extensions, which Pine and Mutt do very well, and they work from purely keyboard input without concern for the layout of graphical interface elements.
Seriously, Lynx is a good thing to have on one’s computer if one is a web developer. Apparently a lot of screen readers use Lynx as a text-based browser. Checking that the text and links of a website are coherent, readable, and usable in text-only mode is a very good thing. Not to mention being legally required in some circumstances.
I’m definitely not the last hold-out in my line of work, but it’s a dying breed.
“Perfect” is why I used it for so long. “Pretty much” is why I finally bit the bullet. Handling attachments was a big thorn. Handling garbled hyperlinks was another. (Making everyone stop sending such encoded strings seemed a less pragmatic solution.) Email address “auto-suggestions” will be a big time saver for me: I often need to compose an email to a random few people that have no reason to be in my PINE address book but nonetheless have been in my email history at some point. Having to look up such email addresses when I’m just trying to fire off an email in under 15 seconds is sort of a bummer. I also see the “labels” approach as superior to “folders”. I’ve often not been 100% sure which folder I’ve stashed a message in, and gmail’s paradigm eliminates that issue while keeping the organizational benefits of folders. The “browse messages while composing” thing is nice. And a few others… I think I’ll be a quick convert, but only because of the attention to detail Google has put into the interface. If I had to use some generic, platform-dependent IMAP client or whatever, I don’t think I would have convinced myself to switch.
A few months back, a friend of mine was sitting with me at my computer because I needed to send him a couple of reminders.
ME: “Here, I’ll send you an email with the info.” brings up minimized PuTTY window with PINE active
HIM: tells me a few things to type into the email
ME: “Okay, sent.”
HIM: “Thanks!..” pause “By the way…” contemplative pause “What the hell *was *that!?”
