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I'm curious - have you ever used a text/curses based email client ? It's amazingly fast and you can forget all about browser security since you do it over SSH.

by rsync 11y ago

I'm curious - have you ever used a text/curses based email client ? It's amazingly fast and you can forget all about browser security since you do it over SSH. It's an extremely efficient workflow (albeit with some hacks required to get modern functionality). I switched to pine in ... 1993 ? I've never used anything else (except for brief stints of corporate email account and consulting, many years ago). You'll note that in the "screenshots from famous developers"[1] that Brian Kernighan (Unix legend, the K in K&R and AWK) is using alpine in his 2015 screenshot... [1] https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-2015/ https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developer...

darklajid 11y ago
Yes. I was using (al)pine for a while. It's bearable, okay even. But I guess I don't see how you could turn that into a 'mobile' client. For the time I used pine I was ssh-ing into a box of mine for most of the day, while I was in front of a computer. I didn't care much about mail notifications on the go. Now I do. If there's some (reliable! I don't care about the initial one-off effort) way to make that work with emails on the go, I'd be glad to learn about that.
- vox_mollis 11y ago
  But I guess I don't see how you could turn that into a 'mobile' client Solution to this is to remember what the purpose of email actually is. It's supposed to be asynchronous communication, with the expectation that it may be checked, at most, 1-3 times daily. If you need communication immediately and in any location, instant messaging covers that use case much better.
  - darklajid 11y ago
    We have to disagree about the purpose here. For me mail is for async, coherent exchanges. IM is not a replacement: It is usually a conversation, usually short and short-lived and synchronous. Async doesn't have to imply that I don't get a notification about your mail. It just means that I probably won't answer right away - or at least on my time. Anyway: Mail plus ~instant~ notification is a thing for me and I don't want to give that up.

by rsync 11y ago

darklajid 11y ago

Yes. I was using (al)pine for a while. It's bearable, okay even. But I guess I don't see how you could turn that into a 'mobile' client. For the time I used pine I was ssh-ing into a box of mine for most of the day, while I was in front of a computer. I didn't care much about mail notifications on the go. Now I do. If there's some (reliable! I don't care about the initial one-off effort) way to make that work with emails on the go, I'd be glad to learn about that.

vox_mollis 11y ago
But I guess I don't see how you could turn that into a 'mobile' client Solution to this is to remember what the purpose of email actually is. It's supposed to be asynchronous communication, with the expectation that it may be checked, at most, 1-3 times daily. If you need communication immediately and in any location, instant messaging covers that use case much better.
- darklajid 11y ago
  We have to disagree about the purpose here. For me mail is for async, coherent exchanges. IM is not a replacement: It is usually a conversation, usually short and short-lived and synchronous. Async doesn't have to imply that I don't get a notification about your mail. It just means that I probably won't answer right away - or at least on my time. Anyway: Mail plus ~instant~ notification is a thing for me and I don't want to give that up.