[techtalk] Opinion needed on Mail Clients

[Claudine Chionh]

Hi Kelly and others,

On Wednesday, 06 June 2001, Kelly McQuarrie scripsit, 
> I've been using pine since I switch to unix so I can't compare it to
> anything else.  Why do you like mutt better? Maybe I should switch?

Hmm, I changed from pine to mutt over a year ago, so my comparisons are 
based on pine 4.21 (or thereabouts).

Most impressive feature for me is threading - *real* threading, not the 
group-by-subject sorting that some other clients use.  If you sort a 
mailbox by thread, Mutt scans the References headers of messages to 
construct threads and displays them in the message index with a tree 
diagram.

It also does this reasonably quickly.  When I was considering changing 
from pine to mutt, I found that mutt took less than half the time of pine 
to open and sort a remote IMAP mailbox with approx 2000 messages.  
Speed and threading were enough to convince me, but there are plenty 
of features I've since discovered in mutt that I can't do without now.

You can search within messages - all headers, selected headers or 
message bodies, using patterns and regular expressions.

It is so much easier to change the From header, use different signature 
files, etc, which can be changed on a per-message basis using 'hooks' 
or rules.

Mutt handles mailing lists better than any other client I know of - 
when replying to a mailing list message, you can reply to the list only, 
to author only, or to both, regardless of whether the Reply-To header 
has been changed by the list-admin.

Mutt can access remote POP mailboxes as well as IMAP ones - I don't think 
Pine can do this.  Reading POP mail remotely is kludgy at the best of 
times, but if you have to do it (as I did when my ISP's mail server 
was playing up), mutt gives you that option.

Mutt can be customised in a boggling number of ways.  This seems to 
scare off some people - the number of options available, and the fact 
that configuration is done strictly by editing config files, not 
filling in menus.  I think these are the characteristics that also 
attract people who like tons of options.

Hope this gives you some idea - perhaps the other mutt gurus on the 
list can help convince you <g>.

Cheers
Claudine

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