FC2 ate my system

[Satish Balay]

On Thu, 27 May 2004, James Wilkinson wrote:

> Christopher Stone wrote:
>> How do you know he is using pine?
> His message-IDs begin "Pine.". Dead give-away.
>
>> He should be using mutt if he is using a console,
> Arguably, yes, but IMHO mutt took a lot more configuration before it
> worked the way I wanted it to work. (I'm on it now, though...) I must
>
> And there's no reason why he shouldn't be using text mode MUAs in an
> xterm, either.
>
>> and anyway, if links can click on urls, so should pine.
>
> That's very debateable. Links is a web browser, and pine (and mutt)
> aren't. Philosophically, an MUA has no business trying to interpret a
> non-MIME non-UUencode mail body, or a text/plain message part. Which
> is what it would take: either MUA can shell out to links, but the
> difficult bit is working out "what's a URL". (Links gets it easy,
> because HTML identifies a URL unambiguously).
>
> Practically, identifying URLs gets messy. Something of the form
> http://localhost/ might be easy, but then "why don't you support
> www.example.com? Or http://www.example.com/test.php?"
>
> (It might be interesting to see how many URL-identifying programs
> include those question marks as part of the URL.) I maintain that there
> is no Right Way to do it, especially when URLs line-wrap. Microsoft
> programs can get hopelessly confused. It's a lot of extra complexity
> incidental to the business of e-mail.
>
> Also, links is designed around the concept that it's going to show
> hypertext, and so the scrolling supports hyperlinks in the text (down
> means down to the next hyperlink, which might be scroll down a page,
> or down a line). Mutt and pine are designed around the concept that
> they're going to be showing plain text, possibly with attachments.
> Changing either MUA to show hypertext would be a major change to the way
> either program worked, and inconvenience their main purpose of showing
> plain text (down normally means scroll down, except occasionally?)
>
> Philosophically, the Unix Way to do it would be to have a separate
> find-url program that could be shared between programs (or easily
> replaced). This would get you what you want without bulking up links or
> the MUA: the MUA would pipe the body-text to find-url, which would
> run links with the (user-selected) URL.

Not sure why pine bashing is hapenning - but it works pretty well for
me.  I've tried to switch to mutt - and stayed back with pine. (roles
feature is great!)

The biggest drawback of mutt is - you need a functional
sendmail/postfix on the machine. And if you wish to use multiple smtp
servers (because of multiple mail accounts) - you are hosed. (It could
be argued that one doesn't need this feature but...)

And pine does process urls - I use 'epiphany' as my urlviewer - with
the following entry in ~/.mailcap

text/html; /usr/bin/epiphany %s ; copiousoutput

And I believe urls are properly defined by some RFC - and any url
processor should be able to grab the correct ones - and ignore the
wrong ones.

Mail-clients that wrap lines mess up things - but thats the
mail-client's (MUA) fault.

Satish