Dear all, I have happily used (and still use) Pine under Unix. Since I work with project partners that use MS-Office and other WIN2000 programs, however, I now have to move primarily to a Windows environment. I work alot from home or on the road, live out of range of high-speed Internet, and so need to work offline in store-and-forward mode. Ten years ago I had MKS UUCP with Mailx under DOS 3.3, and this actually worked reasonably well. I am lost without vi/vim.
Assuming that Outlook is unacceptable, I have discovered: -- Eudora, Pegasus, and Opera use variations of the mbox format, but all three create database indexes in default directories and cannot handle LF-only files, new mboxes, mboxes elsewherre in the file tree, etc. None of them, gallingly, let you define an external editor like vim. -- Pine for Unix uses the mbox format, of course, but the Windows ports use something called "c-client MBX", not in plain text. PC-Pine can read mbox format, and can even write it if you type #driver.unix\pathname\to\your\mailbox the first time you save. Pine has been recompiled (not by its maintainers, see http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~bli/personal.html) to use mbox format by default, but this apparently does not work under a normal Cygwin shell but only under Exceed or XFree86 -- I have gotten the latter to work, but not the former (the xterm disappears before offering a prompt). However, with the Cygwin variant there does not seem to be a way that one can click on a URL to start an external browser -- necessary functionality which PC-Pine supports. It is also not clear to me how, if at all, the Pine setup can store- and-forward, which is necessary for offline working. -- I managed to get the mutt- and fetchmail-based Unixmail suite partially to work (see http://unixmail-w32.sourceforge.net), but if it has store-and-forward, I cannot see where to configure this and where the spools are put by default (I have studied the documentation and tried several experiments). If it is in fact supported (I am starting to doubt it), this store-and-forward part will evidently require more tweaking, and the urlview interface that apparently works under Linux (for invoking an external browser) has, that I am aware, not yet been ported to NT/WIN2000. Having spent several long days working on this (I am not a programmer), I must confess I'm at a loss. Should I keep tweaking away at any of the above? Should I look to running pine on top of Linux on top of VMWare on top of WIN2000? Or pine under Linux, with VMWare for MS-Office? Or should I download two identical email streams in parallel -- one into mutt, for processing into mbox files and editing with vim, and one into Eudora, for browsing URLs contained in messages and collecting attached binaries automatically in a default directory? Any advice gratefully received. Tom P.S. I have WIN2000 with MKS Toolkit 7.5, Exceed 7.0, Cygwin (very recent), XFree86 (installed today), Eudora, Pegasus, Cygwin-pine, Cygwin-pine-with-mbox, Unixmail, Unixmail Mutt, Cygwin Mutt, Mailx. ---- Dr. Thomas Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Birlinghoven Library, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institutszentrum Schloss Birlinghoven +49-30-8109-9027 53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany fax +49-2241-14-2619
