[TriLUG] Moving beyond pine

Chander Ganesan chander at otg-nc.com
Mon Jul 2 09:07:58 EDT 2007


Hi Andrew,

Andrew Perrin wrote:
> All right folks, this is an advice request.
>
> I've been using pine for email since about 1992. I like certain things 
> about it, but frankly I prefer GUI-ish mail interfaces such as 
> thunderbird. What's holding me back are two minor but irritating, related 
> issues:
>   
I made this move around about 2000 myself.  I no use Thunderbird, but 
used a wide range of different tools for awhile.  The first step in my 
move was to move all of my mailboxes to IMAP - I had well over 1 gig of 
messages, and to make them actually usable via imap I installed a UW 
IMAP server (which uses the Mbox format) and used a utility to move them 
over to a Cyrus IMAP server (message access is oh-so-much faster with 
Cyrus).  Since then I've transitioned to BINC IMAP (which uses Maildir).

The key here is that once you make the move, you can use any client 
(including Pine) which supports IMAP - so you get a "gradual" transition...
> 1. I like pine's saved folder rule that puts outgoing email, by default, 
> in a folder named after the recipient's email address (stripped of 
> domain). This is very intuitive to me, and lets me quickly grep for 
> whatever I need. I haven't seen other clients do this.
>   
You might check if there is a thunderbird plugin for this....I haven't, 
but I would be surprised if you were to find one.
> 2. Relatedly, I have 15 years worth of saved messages in such format, and 
> it woulld be absolutely imperative that I be able to access them with 
> whatever new reader I choose.
>
> Thoughts? I don't mean to start a flame war, just to see if I'm missing 
> anything that would make my life more colorful.
>   
I like thunderbird, it's neat. :-)   And all of the threading, 
organizational, and other tools make it very useful.  Search for me is 
fairly quick, and I have (at present) 4826 messages in my inbox spanning 
3+ years (with lots of attachments).  I do full text searches about once 
every week or so, and can't complain about performance...

Chander
> Andy
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
> Associate Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
> University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
>
>
>   


-- 
Chander Ganesan
The Open Technology Group
One Copley Parkway, Suite 210
Morrisville, NC  27560
Phone: 877-258-8987/919-463-0999
http://www.otg-nc.com




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