On 28-Feb-02 at 20:39, Ryan Singer's inspired musing was thus : > On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 11:05:16AM -0900, Tim Johnson wrote: > > > > Is there anyone on this list that would like to contribute some > > comments about the advantages of switching from something like > > netscape mail to mutt? > > the biggest advantage for me is speed. i can fly through my email w/ mutt, whereas most GUI clients force you to putz around with scroll bars and double clicking, etc etc. the producitivity increase is so significant that i can't imagine using any other client.
> the other advantage for me has been the fact that i can now centralize my email. mutt and my mailboxes are on my computer at work, to which i can SSH whenever i want to check, read, or futz with my mail. > oh, and turning those obnoxious HTML emails into text? i love it :) Well you could do that with PINE, or just by typing mail at the command prompt (with the exception of the HTML part)... anyway it isn't mutt that turns HTML into text. I switched to mutt FROM pine, for 2 reasons: - 1) Because I learned that PINE, which has always been pre-installed on my system, is not open source. I encourage open source from a personal, quiet point of view, purely by running software that is GPLed, getting to know it, and installing it it around the place as an alternative to paying Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and others. - 2) Because I wanted more than PINE. I read about Mutt's colour coding, macros, key redefinitions, etc, and have already started to play a little bit. I can customise my reply header, etc etc However, Mutt is probably the hardest to set up email client. I had to install Postfix and tweak it just to be able to send mail. Some people call this an advantage, I call it a great inconvenience. So, Mutt is not ideal for anyone other than sysadmins, hackers and Linux lovers who like spending quality time with a command prompt. PINE does much of what Mutt does but can be installed by a doofus on a PC (precompiled PC-PINE was most of my college contemporaries first introduction to email in 93-94) or Unix, Linux etc and works pretty much out of the box. On Windows, Outlook Express is installed by default and used by 95% of our dial up clients. They already have something that works and will not try anything else. For them, Outlook Express /is/ email. However sad that may be. I sure don't see them compiling Mutt using a cygwin environment or anything, but I have switched /some/ to PC-PINE, that's about as far as I'll get. Mutt is a little bit like a connaisseur's mail client. It has advantages for me which are more aesthetic and GPL based for me than anything else; I was reasonably happy with PINE and really miss some of its quirks. There's no point promoting it to the masses, they just won't understand. >From a Morocco point of view, and for Africa in general, I would not say that Linux Advocacy is a waste of time. Make a product freely available to the people, and they will do with it what they want. No point bitching, moaning, being a purist, etc etc. Just do it! It sure is an advantage to us here to be able to give a product for free, and charge just for our services. Our clients can do way more with their low budgets. -- |-Simon White |-Internet Services Manager |-MTDS S.A. |-tel +212.3.767.4861 |-fax +212.3.767.4863 |-14, rue 16 novembre |-Rabat, Kingdom of Morocco
