Gmail vs Pine 603
Snarfed has an interesting review on Gmail vs Pine. From the article: "I've used Pine as my email client for, well, pretty much forever. I use it because it's fast, powerful, stable, and very keyboardable. (I hate the mouse.) However, since I work at Google, I'm constantly bombarded with people who ask me why I don't use Gmail. After hearing the nth person brag about how much it increased their productivity, I finally broke down and tried it. I didn't expect much, since I've never liked web-based email clients. However, I made myself use it as my only email client, for a month, to give it a fair shot."
One Point For Gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:2, Interesting)
(What it doesn't kill is that pine still sucks, gmail for life!)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, I have 200+ GB of storage available to Pine. Not that I'll ever need it, but it is there.
I don't need a client with Pine — Pine is the client, and it runs on my home machine, no matter where I access it from. Which reduces the client-side needs considerably. All I need is a shell of a few K in any computer system. You, on the other hand, require a multi-megabyte browser that supports client-side operations.
I can access Pine from home
I can access Pine from work.
I can access Pine from my phone. And my PSP. And my Palm. And my old Amiga. And my Mac. My old 64k OS9/6809 system. And my various other old systems that don't support Java and other client-side technologies. And any *nix system on the planet. I look forward to being able to check my email from my PS3, when they finally get it out the door. All I need is a telnet or (preferably) secure shell, and as they're saying it is linux based.... done deal, probably. I have a dial-up connection on my linux machine that allows me to log in from the oldest, lamest modem I am ever likely to run into. And yes, from there... I can run Pine.
Pine can take advantage of all manner of cool and innovative spam filters and other kinds of filters. Bayesian, white/blacklist based, custom, you name it. There's no spam in my Pine mailbox at all. Also, there are no ads. You, on the other hand, have Google providing ad content all the time you use GMail. Which is not a lot different from constantly being spammed, at least, to me.
That's not all. You are allowing Google to both hold your messages (privacy may become an issue at some point) and you rely on them to stay available to you — they could decide to drop GMail at any time, or the servers could crash, etc. If you use Pine, you have complete control: You are storing your own data, you can implement any backup technology that satisfies your need for security and data retention, there are no extra privacy issues to speak of, the goverment can't get your private messages with a general legal attack on Google.
Don't kid yourself. If you are comfortable on the command line, there are a million programs that will do all manner of cool things for you. Pine, however, is menu-driven and because of that it is generally easy to use for just about anyone, and it doesn't require anywhere near the usual savvy we associate with CLI-mavens.
I'm not saying you should turn to Pine, either. The version of Pine I am familiar with doesn't do HTML for crap, can't embed images, doesn't do formatting and so on. I don't care, because I actually use email to communicate words, silly me. :-) But don't for a minute think that it isn't accessible, practical, powerful, and full of cool features. It is all of that, and more.
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)
GMail only uses javascript (supported by any browser that wants to have more than 1 person download it) for the client-side code.
The lite version doesn't even use that. It's pure HTML, maybe a little bit of basic js that won't change the way it works.
Most, or even all, of the devices you mentioned have a browser already on them which can in fact access gmail.
One more key point - lack of security (Score:3, Insightful)
I presume you also need cookies as well, but I can't say, as I avoid gmail like the plague.
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:4, Interesting)
I have never in my life understood the storage space arguement, and it was one reason I resisted moving from Hotmail to GMail (I have to admit, it's embarassing now to think that I resisted moving away from Hotmail) -- Google's 2GB promotion point made it seem like that was the only reason you'd want to switch over. I'm currently using a whopping 45 megs of space on my GMail account (this includes about 400 e-mails from particular mailing lists I subscribe to). If you ask me, GMail is popular because it's web-based, people are comfortable with web-based clients, and it's surely the fastest and (arguably) the best web-based e-mail service around.
Are the features worthwhile? I guess that depends on who you ask. I think labels are the dumbest "feature" in GMail. If I see that I have mail in more than one label, I (and I imagine most people) instinctively think that I have two separate, distinct e-mails. Not one e-mail that falls under multiple categories for some godforsaken reason. The whole GMail ads point is moot under these (webmail) circumstances too. If you think GMail's text ads are intrusive, take some heart medicine and then create a Hotmail account. It's been years since I logged into my Yahoo e-mail account, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's on a similar level.
Ultimately, people use what they're comfortable with. I'm not so particular about my e-mail that I need to have a system-based client configured the way I like it, but I'm particular enough that I don't want to use a different web-based e-mail provider -- GMail does what I want, is fast (for webmail), and is simple, so that's what I use.
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:4, Interesting)
2. You still need a telnet client. Since most people don't use them there's a fair chance that some locked-down PC you try to use will let you use a web browser, but not the command line/telnet. Also, if you care about privacy telnet isn't a very good idea (especially since Windows machines don't have anything capable of using the SSL version preinstalled AFAIK).
3 & 4. Same point as above. Also, with Gmail Google is paying for the bandwidth but with Pine you are (cheap as it might be). There's also the issue of your network going down, your ISP doing maintainance, or whatever else.
5. I don't own a cell phone and have never tried/wanted to do check my mail that way.
6. I'm guessing that Gmail does this without any effort on your part (including initial).
Just pointing out a few cons of your approach. On the other hand, I use BeMail myself, so I suppose I shouldn't critize the versitility of other approaches...
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
22:16:40 up 550 days, 11:40, 8 users, load average: 0.02, 0.13, 0.16
I bet they're not. My arrangement has been rock solid, and Google's complexity is its own curse. :-)
Not a problem. I have one on a USB drive in my man-purse (yes, I carry one... so I have wallet, some tools, pocket knife, palm, PSP, reading glasses (I'm old), all manner of stuff.) In the USB stick is a copy of Putty which covers PCs. I also have my PSP and my Palm, both of which have secure clients (the Palm one is wonderful, but I have to take off my glasses to read the fonts... they're insanely small, yet readable. Here's a pic of it I just took. [flickr.com]) I don't have a real keyboard for the PSP so it is my last choice, but it *is* there. And if the PC can't read the USB stick, Putty is available all over the net. If it's a modern Mac, then it's already got the software it needs, because underneath, a modern Mac is a *nix creature at heart. If the PC itself has a firewall that doesn't allow outgoing SSH ports (I've never run into this, btw) or it's a stone-age Mac (which I really don't know much about in its pre-*nix configurations, and which I have run into), then I can find a wifi connection somewhere and slip in that way using the Palm. It's really not a problem — I have considerably more options than you do with a browser, and btw, no, there are no browsers on a lot of the older machines. Hard to run a GUI browser in 64k of ram, but a terminal emulator will still run just fine.
Nope. My bandwidth isn't metered — I pay the same if I have no connection or if data is flowing all the time.
Um. Well, mine, Google's, same thing, really. Problem related outages can be reasonably considered random. Except I've not been down in years, and Google is down quite often. Though not for long. Mainly because they're always messing with stuff, and mine is 100% stable.
One more advantage: I have all my incoming and outgoing email all the way back to Compuserve days in the late 1980's. All of it. I can search it, noodle over it, sort it, filter it... it's fun.
In the end, again, I'm not suggesting anyone make the change. If they're comfortable with CLI stuff and *nix they're probably already well aware of the huge number of options available to them. I'm happy with how my stuff works, the reliability and flexibility are awesome and I'm independent of anyone else as far as it is possible to be.
I've even got (very slow) SSH access via encapsulated packet radio (I'm a ham radio person, callsign is AA7AS) from my car and boat if I'm anywhere the hams have packet stuff running. I use this in the summer from my boat out on Fort Peck lake here in Montana — the lake is freaking huge. I rock collect out there, swim, and chase my sweetheart around the boat. Which always works out in my favor, as it's only a 28-footer. :-)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:3, Interesting)
Sammy
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
My post was about Pine's capabilities. Not about converting people to use Pine. I'm enthusiastic about it, but not evangelistic. Fair enough?
PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive (Score:5, Informative)
It can be used anywhere by just plugging your thumb drive in with the security of SSH. And you get the benefit of no targeted advertizing (And no company aggregating your life's communications...)
For that matter... (Score:2)
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive (Score:3, Interesting)
java ssh client [binadopta.com]
Feel free to copy the HTML and Java to your own server. Then you can ssh/PINE from any web browser. It's like gmail but it's PINE!
Cheers
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive (Score:5, Funny)
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, I got n00b all over myself there
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't care to have a visitor to my house run an executable from one of my house computers, but I'd be happy to let them use a web browser. I would be hesitant to ask someone to run an EXE from my own thumb drive; seems rude, but I use a browser on others computers often.
I work in a place where SSH ports are blocked. What if you're visit
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive (Score:3, Insightful)
What if your work blocks webmail access? (I've seen that more often than I have seen USB ports potted, or port 23 blocked, or local executables not being able to be run... combined)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:2)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as SSL support goes, Lynx has had SSL support since at least 2000 (if not before), if your "shell provider" is running software which is 6 year
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:2)
Re:One Point For Gmail (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here.... (Score:4, Informative)
Even [cnn.com] Marissa Mayer Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience uses PINE for her business email:
Sorry about the crappiness of the website I linked to, but CNN doesn't know how to design for FF yet.
Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here.... (Score:3, Funny)
You must be related to this /.er [slashdot.org].
BTW, fuel injection was available [wikipedia.org] on the '57 Bel Air.
Thanks. (Score:3, Insightful)
GooglePages (Score:2, Insightful)
Only one way to resolve this... (Score:4, Funny)
GMail Email Client: 5,100,000 results
Pine Email Client: 2,080,000 results
Sorry dude. The unwashed masses have spoken. Time to upgrade!
Given that one of the contesters is the judge (Score:2)
Re:Only one way to resolve this... (Score:2, Funny)
Google Fight [googlefight.com]
Re:Only one way to resolve this... (Score:2)
Re:Only one way to resolve this... (Score:2, Insightful)
I like gmail. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's why I use gmail (over PINE):
Also, this is a comparison of a completely integrated package (gmail) with a Mail User Agent (MUA). I think for my purposes I enjoy finally letting someone else manage all of the pieces for me. I still have my personal favorite MUA for transferring all of my gmail to local storage and archive (just in case something goes terribly wrong) but so far I think gmail is a great piece of work.
Re:I like gmail. (Score:4, Informative)
Don't take it wrong, I use google for the same reasons you do.
-nB
Re:I like gmail. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, but will the things that aren't incriminating today always remain so? Therein lies the rub.
Re:I like gmail. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I like gmail. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I like gmail. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe there's something I don't know about searching gmail, but at the least, it certainly doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me.
Re:I like gmail. (Score:5, Interesting)
- AJ
Re:I like gmail. (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess that's why they call it "beta".
Wonder how much of an impact it would make if we (all of slashdot) submitted feature requests for all of these things via google's feedback mechanism.
Re:I like gmail. (Score:2)
... is a BIG factor. You already have there web search, gtalk, maps, rss, etc, and probably could have much more (i.e. is a calendar on closed beta already). And is just not there as side decoration, i.e. you can manage your past chat conversations as mail messages. Pine could be a great mail client, but gmail can be for you far more than just that.
A response (by a former pine user) (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a gmail account. I think it is the best web-based email out there. I don't think it can yet replace desktop email & won't trust it to until I can more easily transfer all mail, addresses, and settings from and to any other email provider.
Re:I like gmail. (Score:5, Informative)
html/graphics and multimedia capabilities. While I haven't used PINE in a long time, last time I did, mime was almost an add-on, and a bit gnarly to use.
You consider that a *feature*? Ugh. If mutt can't display it, then it's SPAM.
Journal Posting (Score:4, Interesting)
Apart from the obviously silly "An anonymous reader writes " at the start of it.
First time I've seen Journals posted, is it a slow news day, or just trying out another new feature?
Re:Journal Posting (Score:2)
This is the direction the front page should go. Hell, if taco implements this then maybe, just maybe they can regain the userbase which digg has stolen from them.
Re:Journal Posting (Score:3, Insightful)
People have been using OTHER time to read digg and not abandoning slash.
There is no reason whatsoever for digg to replace slash, they do different jobs and if anything, digg has the fark crowd more than the slash folks.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &compare_sites=d [alexa.com]
Re:Journal Posting (Score:2)
Actually, I've been using my OTHER time to, you know, work. It doesn't hurt that I'm too lazy to bookmark Digg.
Re:Journal Posting (Score:2)
Re:Journal Posting (Score:2)
It's actually a good idea, although you're faced with a choice between including an Obligatory Stupid Question at the end of your JE and looking like an idiot to the journal crowd or leaving it out and mostly killing your chances of story acceptance.
I guess in this case, mentioning Google was enough to make up for not closing with "Between Pine and GMail, is Microsoft doomed?"
I feel about the same (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly I used to use pine, for several years in fact, until I got turned onto mutt by a friend, it is IMHO way more powerful, and, configurable than pine.
Thirdly after recommendations from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=181673&cid=15
Nothing beats yahoo and mutt (Score:3, Insightful)
You cannot modify pine and distribute it; you have to make a patch of your changes, and distribute that along with a copy of the source code [washington.edu].
Mutt is superior (as is yahoo mail -except when it comes to pop3 access which is becoming less and less relevent every day)!
Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt (Score:4, Insightful)
Your response is more of an anti-Pine troll than a commentary on the article.
Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt (Score:5, Interesting)
what do yahoo, gmail, mutt and pine all have in common? They are all email solutions, and my comment was addressing the topic of locally-installed and web-based email clients.
Neither yahoo nor gmail are open source, but neither are yahoo nor gmail applications which install locally on your machine either. However, both pine and mutt are locally-installable applications, and that is why I made the comparison between them (as opposed to between pine and gmail, which is about like comparing pumpkins to gym socks IMO). For a Free system (such as Debian GNU/Linux) installing pine isn't even an option unless you add the non-free branch; this is for the reason which I already pointed out.
Therefore, for people who are running a Free Computer, and who wish to use a CLI mail client, mutt is a more viable choice than is pine.
Finally, I'm certainly not above trolling, but my comments in this article have been both sincere representations of my personal opinion and have been stated appropriately. Your accusation of trolling is as inaccurate as it is inflammatory.
Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer (Score:3, Insightful)
Cynicism is all very well, but make sure there is something to be cynical about first.
Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer (Score:2)
There's a part you didn't understand in my post : comparing an old, outdated, text email client to a new shiny web-based one is complete nonsense. Therefore, the guy can prefer pine all he wants, nobody will care about his preferences anyway because nobody wants to run pine, but he still managed to rattle off a list of Gmail features. You'll also notice that his "bad" an
mirrordot link to the article (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Why restrict yourself to just one or the other?
The Nasty Tab Key (Score:2, Informative)
Hey (or Mr. X or Ms. X...)
I have the habit of indenting paragraphs with the tab key, which in GMAIL places the cursor on SEND and after a bit of typing and the return key (especially when I'm not watching the screen)... There it goes with no body to the e-mail.
Strange review! (Score:5, Funny)
What is this? Some guy tries something that everyone has been using for years now? Hey - guess what I found out the other day - cars! I used to walk everywhere..... Hey! I found out about phones last week! They're great - I don't have to travel 50 miles to speak to ....
Next week... (Score:3, Insightful)
elm! (Score:5, Funny)
The things I hated about Pine were that it unnecessarily reversed colors on the screen to look more "graphical," and its default editor was that horror known as Pico. I much preferred elm and vi.
Re:elm! (Score:2)
The things I hated about Pine were that it unnecessarily reversed colors on the screen to look more "graphical," and its default editor was that horror known as Pico. I much preferred elm and vi.
My first year of college everyone was given a shell account set up with elm and vi. 99% of students could not figure it out on their own. The general engineering course where they taught the basics of vi and elm was a second year course. Needless to say, for that purpose the combination of elm and vi absolutely
Re:elm! (Score:2)
The things I hated about Pine were that it unnecessarily reversed colors on the screen to look more "graphical," and its default editor was that horror known as Pico. I much preferred elm and vi.
yeah, that just might be the least intuitive combination of programs the world has ever seen.
Re:elm! (Score:2)
Re:elm! (Score:3, Insightful)
I have four editors I like for different tasks:
pico (well, nano really) for editing text files. I do not see what so many of my fellow geeks have against this program. It does a wonderful job in this niche.
vi for quick editing, light to medium-duty programming, and sysadmin tasks. It's fast, easy-to-use once you get over the learning curve, and it's installed everywhere.
emacs or jEdit for heavy-duty software construction. When I am in heads down major software development mode, nothing else will d
TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
* It's somewhat faster than your average IMAP server. (Of course, this is both a success of Gmail and a failing of most IMAP servers.)
* Gmail is smart about hiding quoted text and emails i've seen. This rocks. Somehow it even knows the 1% of cases where I actually do want to see the quoted text. I have no idea how.
* The UI for threading, or >>conversations in Gmail lingo, rocks even harder. The killer feature is that the bodies of all messages in the thread on a single screen. Combined with hiding quoted text, this is very powerful.
* Mail is indexed. My average search takes under a second in Gmail, but around 10 seconds in Pine.
* >>Tags, aka labels or virtual folders, are all the rage these days. GMail's implementation of them is slick, and eminently usable. Pine's >>keywords offer most of the same functionality, but compared to Gmail, they're a little clunky.
* There are keyboard shortcuts! Wonder of wonders, it's a webapp that has keyboard shortcuts. Even more amazing, I can actually do most of my normal email tasks with the keyboard shortcuts only. If I couldn't, I never would have given Gmail a second glance.
* I love the Y key, a single keystroke for archiving email. Archiving in pine takes two keystrokes at best, and four if I last saved to a different folder than my "archive" folder.
* The address book is great, mostly because I never have to use it. Gmail automatically remembers everyone I've sent email to or received email from, and auto-completes when I start type their name or email address. I wish Pine did this!
The Bad
* Filtering has a great UI, but it's horribly weak. It has maybe a third of the headers and options that I normally filter on. You can't OR or NOT filter conditions. The set of filter actions is anemic, even with labels. Want me to go on?
* There's no way to bounce an email. This should be pretty trivial to add.
* If no email is selected, the Y key should archive the email under the cursor. This should be common sense.
* You can't automatically create a filter based on an email. Why not?
* You can search, but you can't select messages based on headers, subject, or body text. Worse, if you have more messages than fit on the screen, you can't select any messages that aren't on the screen. If you ever get flooded with email, or with spam that escapes the spam filters, god help you.
* Thank god there are keyboard shortcuts...but there aren't nearly enough! I don't mind using the mouse for one-time stuff, but if i have to use it often during my normal email routine, that's a deal breaker. Keyboard shortcuts for go to label, go to sent mail/drafts, and select all/none/unread would be necessary if I was ever to go back to Gmail.
The Ugly
* Marking messages as read is impossible with the keyboard, and takes three clicks with the mouse: Select ___, More Actions, Mark As Read. I could just leave them unread, but then the labels display is useless for showing which mailing lists have new mail.
* Selecting a message doesn't automatically move the cursor to the next message. This is just plain silly.
* The Y key is horribly inconsistent. If you're in the Inbox, it archives. If you're in a label, it removes the label. If you're in spam or trash, it moves to the Inbox! This is a bad case of modal input.
* Gmail might be smart about (not) displaying quoted text, but it can't handle composing with quoted text to save its life. There are a ton of problems with this, but among others, it needs a way to >>remove trailing quotes when sending.
Loser (Score:5, Funny)
</sarcasm>
Re:Loser (Score:2)
Oh yeah? Well I have pigeons deliver my GMail packets and I hand decode the ones without the evil bit set to on.
Lucky guy (Score:3, Funny)
trust and control (Score:4, Insightful)
WHY?
Because I don't trust the corporate motivation and the corporate mentality that lurks behind Google, or the people who implement their policies.
Google a company and its officers are legally obligated to increase shareholder value, not protect my privacy, or stand for what is right or fair. When the governement comes knocking with an illegal search, they will roll over. Those emails I sent to my friends bitching about some politician... may not be so private. Google's policies give them the right to change the rules in the future, and they have all my communication. Given the trajectory of world events - who knows where things will go.
The other problem is one of people. People can be weak, especially one who need money. When then market is really hot for some other person to buy or sell information, some person will be tempted to take my mail from the Google datacenter, burn a DVD and mail it off to Madison. I wouldn't even know.
Before you say that "I have nothing to hide" - consider printing every email and text message you write and posting them on your office/cubicle or (home) front door. Think about a world where there was a public repository of everyone's phone calls and anyone could go back and listen. Would you feel like you could really express yourself? Everybody has private stuff - lots of it. If you still disagree, mail me your ssn, name, and birthdate.
Communication is too important to blindly trust that someone else will be responsible and look out for your interests.
Re:trust and control (Score:2)
Re:trust and control (Score:2)
Re:trust and control (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want to (and won't) get into an off-topic argument about corporations, but this simply isn't true.
Re:trust and control (Score:3, Insightful)
As for topical relevance in this discussion, the choices that Google makes and the motivations behind them are a central part of the choice to use Pine or Gmail.
No pine for me, so sad. :( (Score:2)
I like Yahoo Mail much better than GMail, but either is preferable to most colleges' webmail pages...
Did Google create a cult we are not aware of? (Score:2)
I can't see a point here. All I see (as advantage) is POP3 but you give Google right to harvest your personal mails for that. Is it OK for you? OK, next time don't jump up and down when poor shareware tries to check for updates over net as "Spy!!!"
For example, when I gave up Spamcop mail, I checked around and there are marvellous and amazing sites just dedicated to mail. One could be http://fastmail.fm/ [fastmail.fm]
As a "geek" you must
Works for Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
J
Speed, search, and threading. Thunderbird? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to RTFA, but snarfed has been snarfed by Slashdot!
I haven't used Pine for a couple of years now, largely due to the advent of IMAP. My prefered mail client is Thunderbird, but it would be a hard choice between Pine and GMail. Now GMail has some obvious GUI advantages (point and click, drag and drop, images, etc.), but I find its threading to be erratic and searches to be less-than-spot-on. The main advantage of Pine is speed for short emails. This evaporates rapidly if you have to write anything substantial.
I'd argue that the author is probably making the wrong comparison. For most users, the choice is between Thunderbird / Outlook and GMail / Hotmail, especially if IMAP is an option.
Thunderbird is flexible about threading, but it lacks the indexed search of GMail. However, as most users are presumably familiar with text searches (a la grep or even the Window Find tool), Thunderbird search is perfect for my needs.
I enjoy the ability to use multiple accounts and the many useful extensions such as Engmail (for OpenPGP support), my own choice of dictionaries, and RSS support.
There are a few annoyances with Thunderbird, such as less-than-optimal support for multiple accounts, but workarounds are available. I've written about some of the problems and solutions on my blog [blogspot.com].
PGP? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it does, is my key safe from subpoena from US government, however long it would take, including bought SCOTUS verdict, that Google has to hand it? I mean, when I use local MUA, my key never leaves my laptop. In case of gmail, unless Google implements RSA, AES etc in Javascript, my secret key would have to reside on Google servers...
Robert
PS No, I'm not long-haired, bearded, smelly privacy advocate; my company works with national telecom and data retention laws as well as our contract require us to use PGP whenever we pass personal information of their consumers. There are lots of sane (as in non-nerdy) and legitimate reasons to use crypto.
Re:PGP? (Score:5, Informative)
Not directly, but by using the GNOME Panel Applet included with Seahorse [sf.net] 0.9.0 you can perform all the usual encryption operations on the contents of the clipboard. Your private key will never leave your personal comuter.
A fair comparison (Score:2)
Of course i'd access it through Pine, not a web browser.
a lot of problems (Score:2)
so really some problems are simply with the client not meeting his niche of needing the keyboard for every little thing.
Pretty neat article, though, although I have never heard of Pine.
What's missing in GMail (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh - another thing that would be nice would be to be able to set a maximum number of messages allowed in a Label and after that to erase the oldest ones. I know, I am asking to make labels more like folders, but when you are on as many mailing lists as I am, that you know are archived anyway, you just don't want to keep copies of all that crap around in your mailbox. It just makes my POP download of messages (for archival) that much more difficult.
VM, Baby... (Score:2, Funny)
Why I don't use GMail (Score:2)
Actually, that's pretty much it. Call me when they implement that.
Bonus: OK, here's #2: I use Yahoo's webmail. Looking at my inbox, I want to read, say, 5 random messages out of the 10 new ones. So, I middle-click on them to open each one in new background tabs. They are all loaded by the time I sta
Loading... (Score:2)
Googling the problem doesn't help much. It turns out all I need to do is clear my internet cache. Well, gee
Indexing (Score:2)
This guy works for Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
(I don't know who this guy is, and the site is Slashdotted.)
Anyone who hates the mouse automatically loses (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF.
Webmail is a technological step backwards (Score:4, Insightful)
But for email, the "whaaa??" turns into "Are you insane??" Even before the government got caught spying on citizens without warrants, giving them (or anyone else) a one-stop-shopping point for all their intercepts, was an unnecessary risk. Now it's just stupid, and not for "paranoid cypherpunks" but even for any average Joe who has opened a newspaper in the last few years. WTF are you people thinking? Start encrypting, and make them break into your home if they want to read your email. Give them a chance to get caught.
We should be moving away from these old-fashioned centralized servers, taking power for ourselves. C'mon, run smart a client that actually knows what it's working with (emails) rather than pretending everything is a web page, and let that 386SX be 97% idle instead of 99%.
Apples vs. Oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, GMail and Pine do totally different things. What's the point?
Re:I used the other tree... (Score:2)
SSH. Elm rocks Pine's world.
Re:Interesting story, but... (Score:2)
Re:Gmail is NOT an e-mail client, you fool (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Snarfed" (Score:3, Informative)
"Snarf" already has a definition [catb.org].
Schwab
Re:Outlook is where its at (Score:3, Funny)