Bhyrava Prasad forced the electrons to say:
>
> Pine has the following advantages I can think of -
>
> 1) Can use IMAP
> 2) Can do MIME, so can send and process attachments (last I
> knew, elm could not do this directly).
> 3) Has more options which can be configured
> 4) Exists on non-Unix platforms.
> 5) PINE - Pine Is Not Elm!
Pine has two other major advantages - it is very easy for the beginner
user to learn and configure, and it is also a usenet news reader (albeit
not a threaded one).
The major disadvantage of pine is its size. On my RH 6.0 machine, the sizes
are (stripped ELF dynamically linked executables) in bytes:
pine: 2164960
elm: 305232
mutt: 415800
The reason for this is that pine comes with an editor, spell checker and
a file browser in-built, whereas both the other programs use external
(configurable) helper software. IMO, that is in line with the standard
unix philosophy that one program should do only one thing - in the current
case, send emails. They shouldn't be MUAs and editors and spell checkers
and newsreaders at the same time. We have a really great spell checking
program in ispell, so why reinvent the wheel? Maybe pine was designed to
act as a shell substitute for the newbie to unix (that probably explains
why pine can _also_ be used to change your password on unix systems).
Elm is almost outdated - IIRC, it cannot even attach files, you have to
uuencode files to mail them using elm (I might be mistaken here). Its
advantage (as I see) are a lot many helper programs like answer, frm,
filter etc. and the concept of alias database.
Now we come to mutt. It is:
IMAP _and_ POP compliant.
can do mime - send, process etc.
has many more options than the other two console MUAs under discussion.
Supports console colour if used with ncurses.
Supports pgp and similar encryption packages.
The designers insist that its size be kept as small as possible.
The rc file is really powerful - it has macros, hooks, ...
multiple signature file support.
support for mailing lists.
OK, maybe this will start a flame war, or it might not, but it was
not my intention to start one. I was just listing the virtues of my
favourite MUA...
Regards,
Binand
--
#include <stdio.h> | Binand Raj S.
char *p = "#include <stdio.h>%cchar *p = %c%s%c; | This is a self-
int main(){printf(p,10,34,p,34,10);return 0;}%c"; | printing program.
int main(){printf(p,10,34,p,34,10);return 0;} | Try it!!
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