Yay for PINE
Having returned home to Devon earlier today, the logical thing to do tonight was, of course, stay up late watching movies (Napoleon Dynamite, Independence Day) on Film4 with beer and crisps, then stay up later hacking my Linux-based laptop onto our home wifi. That done, the laptop was due a rather large number of updates, which, over 802.11g, took around about 2 hours to download and install.
What does one do whilst waiting for said updates? Hack around on the desktop PC, of course. I now have a (pretty much pointless) installation of Horde on my domain, and a copy of PINE on pip, the SRCF’s linux box, appropriately set up to read my Google Apps email account via IMAP.
This will probably now solve all possible need-to-check-email scenarios; I fully intend to never be too far from my USB stick with Portable PuTTY, if I think I might not have access to a terminal of some description. Of course, in the majority of places, Firefox will do nicely, Thank You Very Much: the web interface is, for me, far superior to PINE (which doesn’t support things like starring messages, and deals awkwardly with labels, and the general “never delete a message” philosophy). But for those situations when bandwidth/memory/time are really short, PINE is a good thing!
Oh, and Napoleon Dynamite is, to be completely honest, not as fantastic a film as I’d been led to believe. The famous dance sequence is hilarious, but other than that, it’s pretty forgettable, and takes forever to get going (arguably, never getting beyond first gear, but then subtlety-of-plot is a valid artistic idea). Just not my kind of humour, I suppose.
> far superior to PINE (which doesn’t support things like:
> starring messages
If you mean selecting multiple msgs then yes it does – look for 'enable-aggregate-command-
If you mean marking msgs as important then *,* is the key combo you need…
> and deals awkwardly with labels
Meaning? Labels are a (albeit nice) t-bird concept (and not an IMAP one) really – however, a quick google gives me:
http://andrew.triumf.ca/em
Which makes pine nicely compatible…
> And the general “never delete a message” philosophy
Uhm, what's wrong with PINE here? You can delete msgs if you want, or not if you want – if you enable the aggregate command set then pressing ; as you read msgs to end up in the same folder, then a,s,CTRL+T is a really quick way of organising msgs.
In fact I tend to revert to PINE to do that when my inbox gets big; it's far more reliable than drag-n-drop if you have thousands of folders…
So – YEY for (al)PINE
I'm aware of the aggregate functionality – it is in fact on by default, in my installation at least! I meant starring in the specific Gmail way: it's not exactly the same as Important (or at least, doesn't have to be), but on investigation, it seems that Gmail does interpret a PINE * (important) flag as a web-interface Star, so thanks for that!
It's much clunkier to unflag a message in PINE than unstar a message in my browser though…: *,!,* which is three shift-commands in a row, at opposite ends of the keyboard.
By the "general NDAM philosophy", I meant that it's hard to make PINE send things to All Mail rather than Trash – which is what Gmail encourages. You can do this fairly (but not totally) trivially in Thunderbird. The issue is that if Gmail has something in Trash, all copies of it are in Trash, and you've really, properly deleted it, which is not what I want to do when "deleting" from a label-view – I simply want to remove that label.
(cntd)
This is also why it's awkward with Gmail labels – it only understands them as folders. Gmail allows the same message to be in multible labels, whilst PINE sees unconnected (but identical) messages in a number of different folders. I DON'T mean labels in the thunderbird sense – i.e. "Important", "To Do", "Funny" etc – I mean the Gmail labels which are used in place of folders within the web interface. The Pine-mix page doesn't address this AFAICT.