Upgraded My Mail Client… To Alpine

A few months ago it was revealed here that I used Pine as my email client. I was mocked by all, especially since the problem I was complaining about ultimately turned out to be a problem with Pine itself.

I would like to report that I have seen the light: I have upgraded to Alpine.

It looks just as sexy in green-on-black terminals as Pine did. Props to the UW for releasing it under an open source license, as well as retrofitting it with the autoconf system.

To preempt this round of mocking I say that as a sysadmin I spend a lot of time using SSH, and Alpine fits nicely into that. I use VanDyke’s SecureCRT for all my remote SSH needs, at least from my desktops and laptop. When I have to use someone else’s PC I use AppGate’s Mindterm free-for-personal-use Java SSH applet, installed on my web server so all I need is a web browser and Java. This way I don’t need to install mail client software, worry about my email getting cached somewhere locally, spend a lot of time configuring a mail client, spend a lot of time waiting for my email to download, worry about interactions between multiple email clients, or deal with always craptastic webmail software.

So there. 🙂

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