pine; alpine, and re-alpine support status

[Jude DaShiell]

Earlier this year I had asked administration over at panix.com to replace 
alpine with re-alpine since re-alpine had later ongoing support than 
alpine.  Administration investigated and decided to not install re-alpine 
since re-alpine according to them lost its support as of 2012.  So for 
those that want to be using a mail package with ongoing support in order 
to benefit from security fixes and new features in future versions, the 
pine tree and its descendants died off two years ago.  Mutt has its 
following, but another package anyone searching for a live one ought to 
look at is nmh.  The whole operating philosophy behind nmh radically 
differs from pine and mutt though but won't pose any problems for the 
dedicated command line users in the linux community.  One security 
advantage to nmh is no.mbox files, every message is stored in its own 
file.  earlier if you found a virus on an .mbox file, the virus program 
(clamav in my case) couldn't tell me which message number had the virus 
and didn't want to allow me to access that .mbox file either.  That's a 
good way to loose lots of email quickly.  With nmh, each individual 
message can be checked by any anti-malware program and deleting certain 
infected messages does not loose you your whole email content.  Due to 
changing support status on software these days it's wise to understand 
learning curves will be ahead as old favorites come to end of support life 
cycles.



jude <jdashiel at shellworld.net>