Gmail vs Pine

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

It can be used anywhere, without needing to install anything. I like some IMAP clients, but this is why I chose Gmail over them.

Re:One Point For Gmail

1. Right now I have 2.7GB storage on GMail.
   Right now, I have 200+ GB of storage available to Pine. Not that I'll ever need it, but it is there.

2. I don't need a client with GMail.
   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.

3. I can access my GMail from home.
   I can access Pine from home

4. I can access my GMail from work.
   I can access Pine from work.

5. I can access my GMail from my phone.
   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.

6. GMail is yet to allow a piece of spam into my inbox.
   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

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.

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.

Re:One Point For Gmail

The discourse that's really missing in this discussion is about demographics. Most casual computer users use webmail I'd wager that a lot of serious computer users do too. Webmail has been around so long that it's become ubiquitous. Logging into my GMail account is simple, and I don't have to carry a thumbdrive with a portable version of putty and whatever else on it in order to get my e-mail from a client/interface that I'm comfortable using.

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

1. But your 200+ GB is on your own hardware. That may be good for privacy concerns (I agree with you completely there), but what happens if it goes down while you're away, or if the harddrive(s) fails? (Or however many it takes for your RAID array to loose data, either way I'm betting Google is more reliable.) That's also 200+ GB that you can't use for something else. Hardware might be cheap, but Gmail is free. (Not to mention that some people don't have a spare computer to run this on.)

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

That 200 is, as you surmise, raid. Current uptime is...

22:16:40 up 550 days, 11:40, 8 users, load average: 0.02, 0.13, 0.16

...(this is a redhat 9 machine, no uncontrolled reboots, restarts, or failures, powered by a 1500 watt 100% online [sinewave] UPS.) Backup is every evening to a separate machine done via cron controlled copy, then archive and copy. If the main server fails, I can log into the backup machine. It's been up less time because I stuck a sound card in it (cheap Dell server — no sound) and had to turn it off to do so. Just 403 days. So as you can see, I don't much worry about my mail system going down when I go out of town. :-)

either way I'm betting Google is more reliable.

I bet they're not. My arrangement has been rock solid, and Google's complexity is its own curse. :-)

You still need a telnet client.

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.

Also, with Gmail Google is paying for the bandwidth but with Pine you are (cheap as it might be).

Nope. My bandwidth isn't metered — I pay the same if I have no connection or if data is flowing all the time.

There's also the issue of your network going down, your ISP doing maintainance, or whatever else.

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.

PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

pine + PortaPuTTY [socialistsushi.com] + a thumb drive

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...)

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

And a computer with a USB port but no Internet access is useful for e-mail how?

Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive

DOH! /me cackles quietly to self.

Damn, I got n00b all over myself there ..

Re:One Point For Gmail

GMail works for me from Lynx, as it does not require Javascript. Of course, my version of Lynx supports HTTPS just fine.

Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....

Even [cnn.com] Marissa Mayer Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience uses PINE for her business email:

I use Gmail for my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast.

I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college.

Sorry about the crappiness of the website I linked to, but CNN doesn't know how to design for FF yet.

Only one way to resolve this...

...GoogleFight! [googlefight.com]

GMail Email Client: 5,100,000 results
Pine Email Client: 2,080,000 results

Sorry dude. The unwashed masses have spoken. Time to upgrade!

I like gmail.

Here's why I use gmail (over PINE):

• web based, can get to it from any browser anywhere
• indexed by Google for me! I'd venture a guess that if you had a gigabyte of e-mail to search from pine, and you did searches all of the time, you'd not find PINE even capable of achieving the "within one magnitude" result you found.
• search is implemented as in Google, i.e., you can enter keywords in any order, any case, etc., and Google pretty much knows what to do. (some may not realize but Google even has nuance in what is returned in what order based on the order keywords are entered -- while still managing to preserve meaningful and complete results)
• when there are new and wonderful features (there sometimes are) they're their without having to install our update.
• 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.
• gmail is nicely folded into my browser interface experience. When I send e-mail from Windows, the e-mail is instantiated in a new tab that automatically disappears when the transaction is completed.
• gmail auto-saves drafts for me - I've been saved by this a couple of times.
• keyboard shortcuts (I know the author complains about the inconsistent overloading, but I've found them comfortable and decent especially for being implemented in a browser... maybe a "vi" background is handy after all!)
• gmail keeps all of my data handy, indexed, and available for that future day someone wants to subpoena my records! (kidding)

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.

In exchange you give Google access to your e-mail if at least for ads, and in addition to had over upon subpoena.
Don't take it wrong, I use google for the same reasons you do.
-nB

Re:I like gmail.

If you're emailing anything incriminating using ANY email server, you're stupid.

Ah, but will the things that aren't incriminating today always remain so? Therein lies the rub.

Re:I like gmail.

Yes. It's called ex post facto law. They can't pass a law against something in 2007 and arrest you if they have evidence you're doing it in 2006.

Re:I like gmail.

I like gmail too, but one thing that really bugs me is that, in my experience, search is fairly anemic too. I'm pretty well certain regexes can't be used, and I don't find that too surprising. But even worse, I don't think that wildcards can be used either, and even worse than that, it seems that substrings can't be used either. As an example, I needed to find a message that I had recieved from citibank. Or maybe it was citifinancial. Perhaps citimortgage. But definitely one of the citigroup companies. So I searched for "citi". There were no results. I eventually found the message by having firefox do a text search on each page of headers for the string "citi". Fortunately, that was in the subject of the message.

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.

Another big flaw -- gMail doesn't search the contents of attachments. When you think about it, this is a pretty serious consideration if you're thinking about using gMail heavily as your main client.

    - AJ

A response (by a former pine user)

I like pine. It is a great IMAP client. Crummy license, but we can't have everything. I used to use it & I don't think you give it a fair shake.

* web based, can get to it from any browser anywhere

SSHing in and using pine locally has fairly high availability. If you happen to be at UW & use the web-based version of Pine, then you obviously have it all. If you are at places you can't ssh, there are java applets which can SSH & you can put one up on your own web server.

* indexed by Google for me! I'd venture a guess that if you had a gigabyte of e-mail to search from pine, and you did searches all of the time, you'd not find PINE even capable of achieving the "within one magnitude" result you found.

Pine searches are pretty speedy for a desktop client. They won't grok attachments, of course. But, if you have local mail, you can just use google desktop search (or spotlight or beagle or grep or find or locate or....)

* search is implemented as in Google, i.e., you can enter keywords in any order, any case, etc., and Google pretty much knows what to do. (some may not realize but Google even has nuance in what is returned in what order based on the order keywords are entered -- while still managing to preserve meaningful and complete results)

It is fairly trivial to setup compound searching using either the email client itself or some other general desktop search tool.

* when there are new and wonderful features (there sometimes are) they're their without having to install our update.

And what if you don't like those new and wonderful features. Or what if a coder not at google has a great idea for a new and wonderful feature? He won't be able to add it to Google. He might be able to add it to Pine (though would only be able to distribute it as a patch--but we already covered the lame license).

* 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.

MIME works fine. Filtering out MIME types works fine. Viewing HTML email as plain text is often useful to extract any information from it. It is easy to send HTML to lynx/(e)links/w3m/etc. Equally easy to open attachments in another program.

* gmail is nicely folded into my browser interface experience. When I send e-mail from Windows, the e-mail is instantiated in a new tab that automatically disappears when the transaction is completed.

I happen to use a window manager that lets me tab any programs together. That being said, I don't see why this is a significant advantage. If you want to check your email, you must always have a tab open to gmail. What if you don't want to have your web browser on? What if you're visiting persnickety java/flash/pdf sites that crash your browser due to some odd firefox extension that has a memory leak?

* gmail auto-saves drafts for me - I've been saved by this a couple of times.

Postponed messages in pine are persistent too.

* keyboard shortcuts (I know the author complains about the inconsistent overloading, but I've found them comfortable and decent especially for being implemented in a browser... maybe a "vi" background is handy after all!)

It is nice that gmail has shortcuts. This is NOT an advantage it has over Pine, though. In Pine, EVERYTHING is a keyboard shortcut.

* gmail keeps all of my data handy, indexed, and available for that future day someone wants to subpoena my records! (kidding)

And they give you plenty of ads based on the content of your email! Oh boy!

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

Re:I like gmail.

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

I like it :)

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?

I feel about the same

First I would like to say it is nice to see an employee of a company looking at positive 'and' negative aspects of a product their employeer makes.

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=150 25454' [slashdot.org]./'s I am experimenting with gmail, and, have been having about the same experience, mostly I am impressed, but I am left with a feeling that it just isn't mature enough yet as a mail client. Don't get me wrong of all the webmail clients I have used this is my favorite, but generally I miss Mutt.

Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

pine isn't even Free Software [gnu.org] for pater's sake!

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

While what you say about Mutt vs. Pine is true, it's not relevant. It's not like Gmail is Open Source either. Yes, you can use an Open Source web browser to access it, but you can use an Open Source ssh/telnet/whatever client to access Pine.

Your response is more of an anti-Pine troll than a commentary on the article.

Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt

>Your response is more of an anti-Pine troll than a commentary on the article.

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.

mirrordot link to the article

the article [mirrordot.org] appears to be slashdotted already.

It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing

There's no need to just use either pine or the Gmail web interface. You could use pine for quick checks to see if there is new mail on your Gmail account (and for periodic backups), and then use the Gmail web interface to organize your mail or to check mail when you're on the road.

Why restrict yourself to just one or the other?

Strange review!

'I've used the Royal Mail as my main communications method for, well, pretty much forever. I use it because it's fast, powerful, good value, and very reliable. (I hate UPS.) However, since I work at Google, I'm constantly bombarded with people who ask me why I don't use the Internet. 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 clicking. However, I made myself use it as my only communication method, for a month, to give it a fair shot.'"

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...

Why LaTex is better than OpenOffice. Does anyone else find this article kind of odd? While I can see my mom using gmail, I don't think I could convince her to use pine. Granted pine might be more powerful, and the additional features he listed are probably worth adding, but pine is sorta.... vt100-ish.

elm!

Back in the dark ages before webmail, only newbies and English majors used pine. Everyone else either used mail or elm. I personally used elm, and still prefer it if I ever need to use a command-line mail utility, which isn't all that often these days.

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.

TFA

The Good

* 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

Heh ... you're using Pine? Real nerds just telnet to port 110.

</sarcasm>

Lucky guy

If you work for Microsoft and you use Pine to access your Hotmail account you've already meet SteveB for a nice one-on-one :-)

trust and control

I use mutt and I run my own mail server on hardware I own. It's not that hard. I have given gmail a fair shot, and for a time, was using it to archive my mail. It's a great product but I will not use it.

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.

Works for Google?

If this guy does indeed work for Google, perhaps he could take a crack at fixing the problems he sees in the gmail source. As I understand it, everyone in Google gets access to all of their source code and can hack away at stuff even if they're not directly involved in the project. It would be pretty awesome if he could fix some of the problems (several of which I agree with) and present them as fixes to the people in Google that run gmail.

J

Speed, search, and threading. Thunderbird?

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?

OK, can gmail do PGP?

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?

OK, can gmail do PGP?

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.

What's missing in GMail

Having switched from IMAP to only GMail about 8 months ago, my only gripe is the inability to 'Mark As Read' in filters - this is my #1 pet peeve with GMail and it seems like it would be *tirivial* to do - why haven't they done it?

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.

This guy works for Google?

I often find it strange when folks post articles online about the company they work for. Unless you're anonymous, an executive, or in the PR dept, is your company going to want you sending out reviews of their products?

(I don't know who this guy is, and the site is Slashdotted.)

Anyone who hates the mouse automatically loses

This isn't 1976, you're not sitting at a dumb terminal hooked up to a mainframe. It's '06, we have graphical user interfaces, in fact we're probably only a few years away from functional 3D GUI's, and you don't like mice.

WTF.

Webmail is a technological step backwards

Any time I hear about people moving capabilities away from their 99% idle multi-gigaHertz machine to a central server so they can run a dumb client on that idle machine instead, I think, "Whaaa??" It's, um, an interesting economic decision.

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

Stay tuned for the article on apples versus oranges. While many like the thick orange skin, record numbers are switching to the soft red skin of an apple.

Seriously, GMail and Pine do totally different things. What's the point?

Re:Gmail is NOT an e-mail client, you fool

Um, he's talking about the Gmail web-based client. It is, amazingly enough, an application used to read and send email. Another cheer for the moderators for modding you up (to insightful, even!).