difficult e-mail?

[Erik Stevens]

Here's my 2 cents on pine vs. other email systems, but I'm a technogeek
wannabe, so this may not be worth much more than .02 ...

What I like about pine:
1) menu commands at bottom of screen
2) help is only 2 key strokes away
3) pine is keyboard (rather than mouse) driven - this is great for fast
typists.  If you're not a fast typist, this is obviously a drawback
4) pine has some basic file management commands - if you know how to trick
the system into it. I often start a dummy message and then use the file
attachment command, followed by ^T - To Files, to rename and/or delete
files from my work directory. When done, use ^E to exit the (file)
browser, cancel the file attachment command, and then cancel the message
itself. I find this to be much quicker than moving through SCN's freeport
menu system to get to file maintenance and delete any unwanted files. The
other advantage is that I'm still in Pine, so I can go back to reading
email.
5) I can telnet from anywhere in the world to logon to scn and read my
mail. This is great when traveling or if you use more than one computer
(one at home, one at work, etc). I don't have to worry about remembering
which computer a particular mail message is downloaded to, like with POP3
mail.

What I don't like about pine:
1) I have to stay on-line to read and respond to messages on SCN (can one
use PC-Pine via remote mail on scn? I've never had much luck with the
remote mail feature on scn, so haven't explored that recently)
2) I have yet to discover a quick way to print out messages - the only way
I've figured out how to do it is to export the message to a file, download
it, and then open it in a text editor on my computer and then finally
print. I've had inconsistent results with cutting and pasting blocks of
text (from scn-pine to text editor on home pc) - often had strings of text
characters "disappear". If there's a download feature from within pine,
I'd love to hear about it, cuz it's a drag trying to remember to do the
file download step after I'm done with pine but before I log off and hang
up the connection.

Can't think of any other pro's or con's at the moment, and I've gotta get
ready for work.  My main beef is that I have to be on-line, tying up my
phone line to do it.  Otherwise, I really like pine and once I learned all
the shortcuts, can read and compose messages faster than MS-Outlook and
Oulook Express, the only two POP3 mailreaders I've used.

I'd be interested to hear other people's likes/dislikes about pine vs POP3
mailreaders.

Erik Stevens
kamast at scn.org
erik023 at sttl.uswest.net

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