Monday afternoon random thoughts

[Don Flynn]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Edward Glowacki wrote:

> Sigh, once again I'm stuck between usability and feature set...
> This time it's email clients... PINE has the best user interface
> for text-based mail clients out there, and while I'm a bit biased,
> I think it's better than most graphical ones out there too (because
> it doesn't require a mouse!).  MUTT however is quite a bit more
> powerful it seems, and has the specific coolness of threading that
> I'm deciding is important now that some of the discussion's I'm
> trying to follow are getting, shall we say, messy.  But MUTT is a
> lot more difficult to use and configure, and I always get the
> feeling that my computer is going to catch on fire if I hit the
> wrong key (I never feel that way in PINE, even when I start typing
> randomly at the menu screens).  Sigh, I guess I just can't win...
> =P
> 

     I'm in a similar situation that you're in right now.  I've been a
pine user since somewhere around '93ish and I've never really wanted
to use anything else.  Pine always seemed to be the perfect mix of idiot
proof and idiot free software to me (if that makes sense).  Now, however,
I'm looking to migrate to a new mail client especially because of some of
the new features that they have, but also because of something you didn't
bring up.  Pine is developed at Washington University and their track
record for producing secure software is a matter of some debate.  I
started noticing this when patches for remote buffer overflows for pine
starting appearing on different errata pages/security lists and when I
got a fairly stern warning from FreeBSD's ports system when I recently
installed pine4 on a newer system.  If nothing else, its inspired me to
learn some new software, so I'm going to be looking into mutt much more
seriously over the next few weeks.

--
"Is that sound you're hearing the trumpeting of St. Peter's angels
 or the screams of Memnoch's tortured souls?"
Don Flynn        djf2@ili.net                   Sayge@IRC