Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by soldermont001 5014 days ago
It would be great if someone could write good text email client. I recently tried some old ones I used in the 90s again, and the quality of software has improved a lot since then.

Mutt:

- gets SSL errors with MS Exchange (gnu bug?), doesn't retry the connection and then stops displaying all your email.

- could never get html to text rendering working, almost all emails blank

- gave up on mutt...

Alpine:

- did actually covert html emails to text fine, most emails are readable

- no key rebindins (sic), I have ^T bound to new-window in tmux, too bad that's the only way to run spell check in alpine is to press ^T

- lose connection to IMAP server causes already downloaded mail to no longer be displayed on the screen

- quirky LDAP lookups, I can't type peoples full names, only their login names, then it resolves them fine

- tried to put my IMAP folder first on the list in the config file to make it faster to get to my inbox, crash

- tried to have it startup in my inbox using the startup key sequence, crash

- if there's one letter in my drafts folder, it asks me every time if I wan't to continue it when I compose a new message

- asks me every time if I want to reply to everyone, and if I say yes, it includes me(!?) so I get a dup email

- has pine's legendary inconstant key bindings (or is that a feature?)

- sending a message hangs the whole client until it's been sent

- no real concept of a deleted folder, just puts a D next to it and leaves it displayed on your screen, so you have to expunge manually if you don't want it to clutter your screen

- all in all, alpine is usable though, but there's plenty annoying things in it we used to think were normal back when pine was popular.

1 comments

I have been using Alpine/Pine for almost 13 years, and agree with most of your concerns. However, some of these can be controlled using the settings.

- Full name search in LDAP work correctly. Have you set name, surname, and given name attributes correctly in your LDAP setup.

- I exclusively used IMAP and have had no troubles with IMAP folder being fist in the list.

- Starting in the inbox (using key sequences) has always worked for me.

- Reply all does not include me in the Cc. Have you tried setting up alternate addresses field in the settings.

For HTML emails, I have set w3m as my html viewer. w3m works better with complex layouts in html.

- LDAP: it's a corp AD server, cn, name and sn are all set correctly from what I can tell.

- Maybe CentOS 6.3 ships with a bad build or lib that causes it to crash. I'm using alpine-2.02-3.el6.x86_64.

- Setting the alternate address fixed the replying to myself issue, thanks!

- I'll give w2m a shot too. ;-)

EDIT: I suspect the crashes when going into the mailbox are due to it requiring me to enter a password.