It would be great if someone could write good text email client. I recently tried some old ones I used in the 90s again, and the quality of software has improved a lot since then.
Mutt:
- gets SSL errors with MS Exchange (gnu bug?), doesn't retry the connection and then stops displaying all your email.
- could never get html to text rendering working, almost all emails blank
- gave up on mutt...
Alpine:
- did actually covert html emails to text fine, most emails are readable
- no key rebindins (sic), I have ^T bound to new-window in tmux, too bad that's the only way to run spell check in alpine is to press ^T
- lose connection to IMAP server causes already downloaded mail to no longer be displayed on the screen
- quirky LDAP lookups, I can't type peoples full names, only their login names, then it resolves them fine
- tried to put my IMAP folder first on the list in the config file to make it faster to get to my inbox, crash
- tried to have it startup in my inbox using the startup key sequence, crash
- if there's one letter in my drafts folder, it asks me every time if I wan't to continue it when I compose a new message
- asks me every time if I want to reply to everyone, and if I say yes, it includes me(!?) so I get a dup email
- has pine's legendary inconstant key bindings (or is that a feature?)
- sending a message hangs the whole client until it's been sent
- no real concept of a deleted folder, just puts a D next to it and leaves it displayed on your screen, so you have to expunge manually if you don't want it to clutter your screen
- all in all, alpine is usable though, but there's plenty annoying things in it we used to think were normal back when pine was popular.
Comments
It would be great if someone could write good text email client. I recently tried some old ones I used in the 90s again, and the quality of software has improved a lot since then.
Mutt:
- gets SSL errors with MS Exchange (gnu bug?), doesn't retry the connection and then stops displaying all your email.
- could never get html to text rendering working, almost all emails blank
- gave up on mutt...
Alpine:
- did actually covert html emails to text fine, most emails are readable
- no key rebindins (sic), I have ^T bound to new-window in tmux, too bad that's the only way to run spell check in alpine is to press ^T
- lose connection to IMAP server causes already downloaded mail to no longer be displayed on the screen
- quirky LDAP lookups, I can't type peoples full names, only their login names, then it resolves them fine
- tried to put my IMAP folder first on the list in the config file to make it faster to get to my inbox, crash
- tried to have it startup in my inbox using the startup key sequence, crash
- if there's one letter in my drafts folder, it asks me every time if I wan't to continue it when I compose a new message
- asks me every time if I want to reply to everyone, and if I say yes, it includes me(!?) so I get a dup email
- has pine's legendary inconstant key bindings (or is that a feature?)
- sending a message hangs the whole client until it's been sent
- no real concept of a deleted folder, just puts a D next to it and leaves it displayed on your screen, so you have to expunge manually if you don't want it to clutter your screen
- all in all, alpine is usable though, but there's plenty annoying things in it we used to think were normal back when pine was popular.
I have been using Alpine/Pine for almost 13 years, and agree with most of your concerns. However, some of these can be controlled using the settings.
- Full name search in LDAP work correctly. Have you set name, surname, and given name attributes correctly in your LDAP setup.
- I exclusively used IMAP and have had no troubles with IMAP folder being fist in the list.
- Starting in the inbox (using key sequences) has always worked for me.
- Reply all does not include me in the Cc. Have you tried setting up alternate addresses field in the settings.
For HTML emails, I have set w3m as my html viewer. w3m works better with complex layouts in html.
- LDAP: it's a corp AD server, cn, name and sn are all set correctly from what I can tell.
- Maybe CentOS 6.3 ships with a bad build or lib that causes it to crash. I'm using alpine-2.02-3.el6.x86_64.
- Setting the alternate address fixed the replying to myself issue, thanks!
- I'll give w2m a shot too. ;-)
EDIT: I suspect the crashes when going into the mailbox are due to it requiring me to enter a password.