[geeks] Apple software: the stuff you "gotta have"

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Oct 11, 2007, at 9:49 AM, Michael Parson wrote:

> I still do most of my mail with nmh.  I read list-mail with mutt to  
> get
> threading, but even after about 5 years of it, my fingers are still

The threading of mutt is what I miss the most.  It's excellent.

I used MH for many years, back when I used to write programs to do  
everything.  It was an amazing system, but didn't age well for what I  
tend to do.

> mostly trained at doing things in pine (which I used before  
> switching to

I never liked Pine, and don't understand the appeal, though I did use  
it for some time at work in 1996-1998.  It can be very efficient, but  
mutt for me was a lot faster.

> (n)mh about 12 years ago) better than mutt.  I detest trading email  
> with
> people on yahoo and hotmail, all that grotesque formatting and markup.

I generally don't like web mail or web forums.  The latter really  
sucks for any kind of complex discussion, and the inability to  
archive postings and use them for reference is a major downer.

> I'm sure there is a setting on their end to force plain-text email, at
> least, I'd hope there is a setting to do that, but the default  
> sends me
> a lot of crap that I have to weed through to read the content.

It's pretty rare anyone using web mail has much I need to read,  
thankfully.

>> Do you mean that you connect to a Mac using a virtual screen program
>> such as VNC and run Maill.app that way, or does it have a CLI
>> interface?
>
> I imagine he means doing dial-up from the mac and comparing running  
> Mutt
> on the Mac with runnign Mail.app on the Mac?

I think he means using it for imap.  Apple's Mail is *very* efficient  
with IMAP.  It puts less load on my imap server than almost any other  
client.

Evolution nearly kills it, and Thunderbird isn't great.  mutt is OK,  
but only because it only loads one group at a time.  Over the long  
run, mutt is horribly inefficient.

> Evolution is a graphical mail program for Linux (does it compile on
> other platforms yet?).  It has a plugin from Novell that lets you read
> your mail on an Exchange server, it uses the same xml/html interface
> that the Outlook Web Access uses.

It's one of the worst written and designed programs I've ever seen.

It's like they wanted to take Outlook, and make something even worse  
based on it.

-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."