Ximian Evolution

[The JoJo]

Just wanted to recommend Ximian's Evolution as a mail reading program. I'm using it with Redhat 7.2 , and I really like it.

Much better atleast than the KMail I used for a while :)

It's an Outlook clone, if I dare call it that.

[Tannin]

One would trust it's a little better than that. :-?

I have become quite wedded to PMMail - www.pmmail2000.com - though I can't say I've seen anything in a mail reader to get me too excited. I guess the best thing about PMMail, as I see it, is that it's cross platform and I don't have to keep switching between different mail clients as I perambulate between home and office.

PMMail has a couple of little oddities, including some weirdnesses in its rendering of HTML formatted messages, which I see as a positive advantage. If someone is so thick that they can't even send me a properly formated (i.e., plain text) email, then I don't want to read it anyway.

And as for the morons that send me their virus-ridden resumes as MS Word attachments .... well ... I guess the only thing to say is "You're pushing your luck, little man."

[The JoJo]

Thanks for the info Tony, I'll check that program out when I have some time.

[Tannin]

Oh sorry, I should have mentioned. No Linux version. At least not that I know of, just OS/2 and Windows. As a commercial product, one would imagine that a Linux version would hardly be a good investment when there is so much great free stuff around for that platform.

[Mercutio]

elm + vi.

Nothing more is needed. Everything else is fluff.

Sometimes I use mozilla mail when idiots send me mime'd attachments or excessively long HTML mail message. elm does the right thing with both, and ignores them completely.

[Prof.Wizard]

elm + vi
Is this actually two programs?

[Mercutio]

Of course! That's the Unix way. I have a program that parses and orders a plaintext file in a specific format (the "mailbox" format common to all Unix systems and to some other stuff like Eudora), and another to edit text.

It works beautifully. There's very little I can't do in elm, and what most people would probably see as faults or limitations (it's a text-only client, it doesn't parse HTML or do text formatting, blithely ignores MIME etc.) I see as advantages.

The total size of elm+vi (statically linked) is 647k on my OpenBSD box. How big is *your* mail client?

[Tannin]

PMMail for Windows: 3764k zip file
PMMail for OS/2: 1776k zip file

You just did me a favour, Mercutio - I went to their site just to see what the file size was. and there is not one but two new versions, a gold release for the Windows client and a new beta for Warp. Nice. :)

[Tannin]

From the PMMail readme (because I am too lazy to express these things for myself, and probably only half aware of this stuff anyway).


================================================== ===
Unique or easily missed features
================================================== ===

PMMail 2000 contains many features that set it apart from other e-mail clients. Some of these features may not be blindingly apparent. Several of these features are listed below.

* Clicking the right mouse button in an entryfield which is expecting an e-mail address will produce a popup menu with many addressing options.

* Selecting a block of text in a message read window and clicking the right mouse button will produce a popup menu summarizing the web links and e-mail addresses contained in that block of text.

* Manual use of canned replies. Once you have configured a few canned replies, they can be used in filters. Few people know that pressing the right mouse button in the body text area of a compose window will produce a popup menu with a list of your canned replies. Selecting one will insert the text of that canned reply in the message body.

* The ability to create very complex filters using Blueprint Software Works's Internet Content Search Language (ICSL for short). You can find more information about this in the on-line help.

* Our "Filter Builder" will assist you in creating filters. It is also a good tool to use in learning the ICSL.

* The "Help" menu on the main screen provides a quick way to get to Blueprint Software Works's web site. (Tannin inserts "gee whiz).

* If you highlight text while reading a message and then hit reply, only the highlighted text will be quoted.

* Drag and drop. You can use drag and drop to file your e-mail messages, move folders, attach files to messages, move addresses, and address messages (drag and drop an address onto an address list).

* Context menus on attachments

* When you get new mail, the PMMail 2000 tray icon will flash to indicate the presence of new mail. * Clicking with the right mouse button on the tray icon is very handy. When you have new mail, it will show a popup menu containing all of your new mail messages for quick reading. Anytime, whether you have new mail or not, you get a menu of all of your accounts with the option to fetch mail, create a new message, or open remote control.

================================================== ===

To that I would add just one bug (at least just one that anoys me): the drag and drop methods are inconsistent between the OS/2 and Windows versions. Sure, Presentation Manage\r, the OS/2 GUI, uses the right mouse for D&D and it's second-rate half-finished clone (Windows) used the left mouse, but most cross-platform apps are, if I can put it this way, ambidexterous. Not PMMail. You just have to remember to use the other mouse button on the other OS. Which I always forget until I can't drag a message.

[CougTek]

Eudora 5.1 has worked fine for me so far.

[Sol]

elm + vi.

Nothing more is needed. Everything else is fluff.



The ability to use the program easily within a week of first installing it is nice. Also having the backspace, pageup, pagedown, home and end keys working could be considered more than fluff.

I don't think I can put it simpler than to say vi and all its spawn are evil, evil creatures which suck the usability out of computers and replace it with esoteric key stroke combinations which serve only to make half of the keyboard redundant.
If your keyboard has been attacked with a power saw and you only have half left, however, I can see how that could be useful.

You could equaly say that higher level programming languages are fluff. We could write everything in machine code if we really wanted to waste our time.

[James]

As they say, vi vi vi is the number of the beast.

I like vi, but only because it's what I'm used to. It's not because it's user friendly or anything.

[Prof.Wizard]

The total size of elm+vi (statically linked) is 647k on my OpenBSD box. How big is *your* mail client?
647K?! :o :x
I guess I have to throw my Outlook out of the Window, right?

Well, the only reason I use Outlook XP is that I've been using its Calendar/to-do-list and other less-known features, and I've been organizing my schedule on it for some time now... and it works fine.

But I would agree with CouchTest on this one (how strange! :P):
I thought Eudora was the best... at least, the most well-known...

[time]

Sol, that was an excellent post. I just loved the imagery.

Personally, I've been persevering with AK-Mail (http://www.akmail.com/eng/features.html) for some years now. It doesn't do absolutely everything that PM-Mail does, but it has quite a few useful tricks of its own.

The best mail client I've ever seen, but it also has remarkably clever copy protection, so I'm always interested in anything new that's reliable.

[Mercutio]

The ability to use the program easily within a week of first installing it is nice. Also having the backspace, pageup, pagedown, home and end keys working could be considered more than fluff.


You know vi has a startup file? And that you can configure additional keyboard mappings if you don't want to use the "vi way" of doing things. Besides, the default mappings on a Linux box include all those keys - and their correct function - by default.

As for first-week productivity, this is what I used to tell the liberal arts people struggling to use email at Purdue (our online systems were all *nix boxes, either SS1000s or Sequent machines): "To start typing, type a vowel. If the one you typed didn't work, try another. To not type any more hit esc. To move around in not-typing mode, use hjkl. To undo something in not-typing mode use u. To save and exit type ZZ."
That's enough to be productive.



I don't think I can put it simpler than to say vi and all its spawn are evil, evil creatures which suck the usability out of computers and replace it with esoteric key stroke combinations which serve only to make half of the keyboard redundant.


So have you never tried emacs? I mean, if we're talking about esoteric key combinations, let's talk about esoteric key combinations.



You could equaly say that higher level programming languages are fluff. We could write everything in machine code if we really wanted to waste our time.

I could. The difference is, for an experienced typist and vi user, everything can be done just about instantly. I can type an awful lot of characters in the time it takes for a mouse-y interface wordprocessor to performace marginally complex task, almost always enough characters to justify not wanting to lift my hands from the keyboard. Reach up, tap escape, type command. Hit enter, type "i", resume typing. Whoosh!
If you've taken the time to learn (as I did, since I had the choice of writing thousands of lines of code for my CS degree in vi or emacs), the level of productivity you can achieve is very, very high.

All programming languages have a place. C has largely assumed the role of assembly language programming, but I don't know many C programmers who would say that, because C exists, there's no reason to write Perl or SQL.

The idea that a software package needs to be completely usable out of the box is slightly preposterous as well. Ever see how much time engineers and draftsmen put in learning a CAD package? Or artists spend with photoshop/illustrator? Or how much time IT people spend trying to learn minutae about their operating systems and platforms? As with anything else, there's a great reward for becoming proficient with complicated software. I've found that often, the most complicated software is the most rewarding once I know how to use it.

[CougTek]

I guess I have to throw my Outlook out of the Window, right?

While you're at it, why not through the whole Window?

[Prof.Wizard]

What about throwing YOU out of the Windows? :wink:

[Tannin]

As a man who habitually and of his own freee will uses a Wordstar keystroke-compatible text editior on a daily basis, what can I say? Except that, Sol, that was indeed a beautifully-written post. Do I detect a hard core of artfully suppressed but nevertheless inextinguishable peotry in your soul?

(Stop it Tannin! Sol dreams of liquid nitrogen pressure-coolers and multi-gigahertz black holes in his electricity account, not of Coleridge or Blake or Yevgeny Yevteshenko. Try to keep at least a little grasp on reality.)

Oh. Sorry Tea. Well, I'll just CONTROL-K Q then.

[The JoJo]

After working for a while with some servers (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, Tru64) that seemed to have only vi installed I must say I'm beginning to like vi very much!

As Merc said, it's very fast to use it as you don't need to move your hands unless you hit ESC. And it seems one is always able to find the editor on servers.

[Tea]

CONTROL-Q B

CONTROL-Q K

CONTROL-Q C

Tannin, as a man who habitually and of his own free will murders the English language on a daily basis, what can I say?

Except that that was indeed a horribly error-ridden post. Do I detect a hard core of artfully suppressed but nevertheless inextinguishable functional illiteracy in your soul?

[Sol]

I think perhaps my intense hatred of vi came from a university unit called systems programming.
Basically we had to write c programs in unix, which was fine. But we were expected to use vi. This really got me as having no experience with it I kept trying to delete with the backspace key and ended up with a funny little ASCII character. That wouldn't be an issue except that obviously I couldn't just hit backspace to get rid of it, although I almost always tried without thinking. The upshot was that finding the documentation and reading through it to find out what to do would involve opening another session (or trying to figure out how to save my one line of code with a funny character), and would realistically take longer than just starting the whole file again from scratch.

It was one of the most frustrating experiences on my life.
The net result was that I tried using pico and ended up using microsoft visual c++, then using pico to make it look like I used vi.
The irony of writing a linux shell in VC98 was not entirly lost on me.



So have you never tried emacs?

Actually funnily enough I did use emacs to write the multithreaded bits of my assignments (funny how they don't seem to work in DOS). I did not however attempt to use the keystrokes as we had some sort of visual version and everything could be done with the mouse.