[geeks] Apple software: the stuff you "gotta have"

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 09:16:42PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> On Oct 11, 2007, at 9:49 AM, Michael Parson wrote:
>
>> I still do most of my mail with nmh.  I read list-mail with mutt to
>> get threading, but even after about 5 years of it, my fingers are
>> still
>
> The threading of mutt is what I miss the most.  It's excellent.

It is the primary feature that got me using it.  Plus the fact that it
properly deals with my mh folders and sequences.

> I used MH for many years, back when I used to write programs to do
> everything.  It was an amazing system, but didn't age well for what I
> tend to do.

It's held up for my uses.  Plus, I'm way too lazy to migrate my nmh
folders to something else.  If I ever do move off nmh, I'll probably
just archive what I've got and start fresh.

>> mostly trained at doing things in pine (which I used before switching
>> to
>
> I never liked Pine, and don't understand the appeal, though I did use
> it for some time at work in 1996-1998.  It can be very efficient, but
> mutt for me was a lot faster.

I switched from elm to pine when I started needing to support MIME
capable mailers (this was before my users had SLIP or PPP, everything
was done with terminal dial-ups to UNIX and VAX accounts).  Once I
turned on enough features, I found it to be rather usable.  It wasn't
till later that someone turned me on to mh and exmh.

>> (n)mh about 12 years ago) better than mutt.  I detest trading email
>> with people on yahoo and hotmail, all that grotesque formatting and
>> markup.
>
> I generally don't like web mail or web forums.  The latter really
> sucks for any kind of complex discussion, and the inability to archive
> postings and use them for reference is a major downer.

I refuse to post in most of them.  I can barely read the few that I do
have to when looking for information.

>> I'm sure there is a setting on their end to force plain-text email,
>> at least, I'd hope there is a setting to do that, but the default
>> sends me a lot of crap that I have to weed through to read the
>> content.
>
> It's pretty rare anyone using web mail has much I need to read,
> thankfully.

Well, I have a few friends and family that still insist on using hotmail
and yahoo, nothing I can do to get them off other than offer them free
access to my systems and I'm kinda tired of supporting the users I
already have.

>>> Do you mean that you connect to a Mac using a virtual screen program
>>> such as VNC and run Maill.app that way, or does it have a CLI
>>> interface?
>>
>> I imagine he means doing dial-up from the mac and comparing running
>> Mutt on the Mac with runnign Mail.app on the Mac?
>
> I think he means using it for imap.  Apple's Mail is *very* efficient
> with IMAP.  It puts less load on my imap server than almost any other
> client.

I've never really looked into that aspect of it.

> Evolution nearly kills it, and Thunderbird isn't great. mutt is OK,
> but only because it only loads one group at a time.  Over the long
> run, mutt is horribly inefficient.
>
>> Evolution is a graphical mail program for Linux (does it compile
>> on other platforms yet?).  It has a plugin from Novell that lets
>> you read your mail on an Exchange server, it uses the same xml/html
>> interface that the Outlook Web Access uses.
>
> It's one of the worst written and designed programs I've ever seen.

Other than the rest of the gnome system...

> It's like they wanted to take Outlook, and make something even worse
> based on it.

I never really understood the appeal of Outlook in the first place.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org