rudis dot net

Back in my day, we didn’t have all these fancy web front-ends to e-mail with their pretty icons and mouse click crunchy goodness. We were lucky if mail got to us at all, since when I started it was *you* configuring the mail hops for uucp delivery (amongst other services). mail or mailx were good enough for us despite their bare-bones approach to message management. The Unix mbox format standardized things enough that other beasts came on the scene. elm was a contender for a while, but the leader of the pack was – and still is – pine.

pine is a mail tool maintained by the top-notch souls over at the University of Washington. I have used pine for as long as it’s been available to the public (pre-POP3/IMAP), whether it be on a *nix variant or even a PC/Mac. At my previous employer where Exchange was king, pine served me well, even though it had to be eventually used in combination with fetchmail for various technical reasons.

When I finally switched over my personal mail to Google for hosting (got tired of fighting spam) I wound up using the web interface as the primary means of mail retrieval, simply because of my disdain for POP/POP3. Compared to IMAP (well call it the FedEx/UPS of mail), POP (aptly named after the government operated postal service) is a loathsome creature, fit for mole men or politicians and it just wasn’t worth dealing with the fact that I wasn’t always operating on the central message store. pine was rarely executed and I stopped staying current.

It wasn’t until recent frustrations with GMail (and Google’s awesome decision to partially support IMAP) that I started to look at pine again and was very pleasantly surprised to see that it’s entering a new era with the release of alpine. The alpine project is a ground-up re-org of the pine source code with the addition of a really nifty web interface that is powered by tcl CGI scripts.

I managed to have just enough time today to grab the sources, do a build and get it installed and configured on my OS X workstation. It works beautifully with GMail and runs fine on the Mac – even opening attachments, but you can look forward to a full review after I’ve been using it for a few days. I am very eager to get the web version up and running as well if only to have a fallback in the even GMail “goes away”.

Technorati Tags: 2007 alpine e-mail email mail pine unix

It took two extra days for me, but my hosted and regular gmail accounts now have access via IMAP! It’s not nearly as necessary now since Google rolled out the new mobile interface for the iPhone. it’s taking a bit to sync via Mail.app, but that’s also over HSDPA.

Configuring the iPhone client was a breeze.

UPDATE: Mail.app has crashed twice so far during the sync attempt.

Technorati Tags: 2007 email gmail Google imap

Here are some links to resources & articles dealing with the need to archive student, faculty and staff email and instant messages:

• Ruling: Schools must archive eMail (eSchoolNews)
• High Court: Don’t delete that eMail (eSchoolNews)
• Federal ruling forces schools to archive all electronic data (Milford Daily News)

Technorati Tags: 2007 email federal instant messaging law MACSA ruling supreme court