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Sukrit K Mehra forced the electrons to say:
> I know this is subjective but, which of these mail clients is best -
> availability across variety of UNIX platforms, easy of use - not too many
> options one never needs, good filtering -
> Elm, Mutt, Pine.
> Also do all of these use the same spell check program. Ispell???
> Can all of them use external editors?
Ah... we are back at my favourite topic!
Anyway, taking your queries one by one -
All of these can use external editors.
All three of them are written in mostly POSIX compliant C, and should
compile on any Unix variant without problems. Pine even has a Windows
port.
I don't think elm has a spell checker option, but you can use a spell
checker from the editor (usually vi, and vim in linux). In vim, :!ispell %
followed by a :e! is usually enough.
Mutt uses ispell by default, but you can specify anything else using
the ispell configuration variable. The spell checker is invoked in the
compose menu using the 'i' key.
Pine, AFAICT, uses its internal spell checker. So, the many features of
ispell may not be available.
Elm package includes a program called filter, a primitive mail filtering
program. Pine also has some sort of mail filtering options. Mutt does
not have any - it wisely sticks to the task for which it was written -
reading and writing emails. You really should use procmail for filtering -
it is much more reliable and powerful.
Pine and Mutt support POP3 and IMAP for remote mailboxes. Elm doesn't.
Mutt can also be used as a command line mailer, like /bin/mail. It can
be used in scripts. This is not possible with Pine. But I think it is, with
Elm.
Mutt and Pine supports PGP/GPG. Elm, the last time I checked, didn't.
For further comparison of the three, you should go to Sven Guckes'
pages. Point that browser to http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes and
navigate from there. I should warn you, Sven has a marked bias towards
Mutt. :-)
Binand
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