Simon White wrote: > > - 1) Because I learned that PINE, which has always been pre-installed > on my system, is not open source.
well to be fair, it's not open source according to some peoples' definition of open source. the source code is freely available and you're allowed to make patches and distribute them; you just can't distribute modified binaries. so while it's not GPL, and it doesn't fit many peoples' definitions of "open source", it's certainly not that bad. > However, Mutt is probably the hardest to set up email client. I had to > install Postfix and tweak it just to be able to send mail. Some people > call this an advantage, I call it a great inconvenience. you didn't have to do that... although it was probably a good idea. there are several lightweight sendmail replacements that would very probably have worked (ie ssmtp, etc.), and these are linked from the site. i do agree that mutt is fairly difficult to setup, and takes some time to get used to. pine is a better client IMHO for someone who doesn't want to deal with the long learning curve and with all the configuration stuff. i figured out how to use pine in an hour or two with little or no computer experience when i was a first year college student. mutt took me several days to get used to, and this is after i had a fair bit of experience with *nix, computers, and mail clients. i love mutt, and wouldn't switch for the world, but i don't think that it's the mail client for everyone. i'd even be hesitant to recommend it to many of my (fairly computer-literate as a rule) co-workers. it is, however, a great tool - and one well worth learning - if you're the kind of person who deals with hundreds of messages a day. i do think that if the mutt developers and the mutt user community want to make mutt a more popular choice, that there should be more effort put into making mutt usable without so much configuration. > On Windows, Outlook Express is installed by default and used by 95% of > our dial up clients. They already have something that works and will > not try anything else. For them, Outlook Express /is/ email. However > sad that may be. it's unfortunte as well because there are much better GUI mail clients out there. -- Will Yardley william @ newdream . net
