pine vs mutt - was: Re: pgp/mime vs in-line pgp

Atom 'Smasher' atom-gpg at suspicious.org
Wed Apr 14 18:41:16 CEST 2004


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On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, darren chamberlain wrote:

> * Len Sassaman <rabbi at abditum.com> [2004/04/13 19:41]:
> > On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Bjoern Buerger wrote:
> >
> > > > now to convince the pine team at UW to implement such a simple
> > > > thing!
> > >
> > > Since _you_ want to use pine, it would be up to _you_ to do that. If
> > > they don't plan to implement it themselves, best thing would be to
> > > send them patches.
> >
> > Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Pine is under a "non-free" license,
> > and the Pine authors have repeatedly rejected such patches. They have
> > no interest in OpenPGP support, period.
======================

exactly. i've been using pine for about 10 years... it's not a case of
"this is what i'm used to", it's really a case of "i've pushed this to the
limits of what it can do and nothing else can do it."

i emailed them to report my observations about the way pine handles
ssl/tls imap connections, and the response made it clear that they just
don't have a clue about security. not even a little bit.


> Sounds like a pretty good reason for a security- and privacy-conscious
> user to switch to something else...
======================

i'd like to switch to a free (as in speech) MUA for ideological reasons.
and of course, everyone knows that mutt is ~better~.

i've tried mutt several times, and i'm willing to learn a new interface,
but it just can't do what i need. i've asked in the mutt mailing list &
usenet, but i'm told the problem (with colors) is in ncurses/slang, not
mutt. either way, mutt can't do what i need, and in the meantime pine can,
and for me the color support is necessary.

i keep checking back with mutt every few years, and when they get the
color support as good as pine has, i'm confident that i can either
configure everything else the way i need it or write my own hooks.


	...atom

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