On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 01:39:06AM EST, Colin J. Raven wrote:
> * David Yitzchak Cohen <lists+mutt_users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2004-02-24 06:49]
> wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 06:32:20PM EST, Colin J. Raven wrote:
> Thanks for an enormously detailed and helpful response! I couldn't have
> asked for better!!! (I guess I should have written "potentially helpful"
> to be boringly pedantic, because I'm going to have to read, re-read and
> inwardly digest the contents of your post)
Yeah, I guess I sometimes ... well, often ... grrr ... okay, I nearly
always tend to get carried away and don't hit :wq until my brain finally
shuts down on me (since it obviously doesn't run open source software,
but somebody on our list is apparently working on changing that, which
sounds pretty cool to me ... gives a whole new world of meaning to those
online personality quizes that say I'm Mac OS X ... even if I'd rather
run Slackware. . .) ;-)
> Anecdotally, a colleague of mine had what amounts to a digital psychotic
> episode yesterday. Kinda like Murphy with a brain chemistry problem.
> He's accessing mail on several accounts using Outlook 2003...and (it
> gets better) IMAP. I don't want to gratuitously bang M$ for the sake of
> it, that gets mighty old after a while, but Outlook is notoriously awful
> with IMAP. This he also found out yesterday, to his consternation.
[...]
> As a band-aid to get him "over the hump", I set up squirrelmail and
> pointed it at IMAP for him and it worked well, but drove him to
> distraction because of refreshes, page pulling et al.
Yeah, Squirrelmail isn't exactly the best webmail program out there
(although I must admit it's the one I've set up for my users, so I can't
bash it too much).
> Last night (before
> I posted my questions) he took a look at my Mutt setup.
lucky he didn't see all my headers (see discussion only a couple of
days ago - thread with "Re: your subject-less email" - for all the gory
details) ;-P
> Mutt was a trial to me (as a former Pine user) in the beginning, but
> reading, tweaking, patience & persistence (the latter two I'm not
> renowned for btw) has paid off hansomely.
Mutt wasn't easy for me either in the beginning (coming from ELM), but I
had three choices when I lost all my mail to yet another well-documented
yet unfixed bug: switch to Pine (which I already knew I hated because
it was the university default - at first I had my own ELM installation,
until the sysadmin finally gave in and setup a global installation),
switch to some EMACS-based mail system (almost unthinkable, since at
that point I was still extremely VI-elitist), or switch to this thing
called Mutt that supposedly had lots in common with ELM. (Lots is a
relative term, I guess.) I picked Mutt since it was the only option
that wasn't already known to be evil, and had to traverse ("climb" isn't
really appropriate here) a very shallow (what most people call "steep"
- blame some dude who decided to educate the list on that topic a long
time ago ... gotta love our list, eh?) learning curve before I could do
anything approximating my routine tasks with ELM in Mutt, and (Ugh!) it
had that annoying Pine-like full-line highlight in the index view (which I
very quickly read up how to nuke), which didn't help my first impressions
one bit. Out of necessity, I slogged through the first couple of weeks
(reading and rereading the entire manual, wondering about this, trying
that out, and finding a whole bunch of new reasons to hate mail in the
process), and finally decided to subscribe to the list in a last-ditch
effort to just make the darned thing usable. As you can tell, the list
worked (although another DC on our list will insist I'm still brainless,
so maybe it didn't work so well?) :-)
Now, what point was I trying to make here? I think I forgot :-(
> usable only by
> people who wear pocket protectors.
Does that mean that those of us who wear T-shirts can't do anything
useful with Linux? I object >:{
Ah, what doesn't exist needs no protection, as some Indian sage would
probably put it ;-P
> Depending on the day you speak to him
> you might get one or other reaction....or just an angry outburst about
> useability. I've gently pointed out many times how useable it really
> is...fate seems to have supported that contention.
I guess something can only be considered for usability comparisons if
it works ... else, it's rather difficult to justify a "usable" label
<text type="shameless MS bashing just for fun">(and yes, MS Works has
got to be an oxymoron ... or maybe just a plain ordinary moron ... I'm
not sure. . .)</text> regardless of its interface.
> Well, sorry for the excessive bandwidth, but thanks to the list for
> guidance and support. It's good to know it's there, and hopefully I can
> contribute as my own knowledge grows, ths maintaining the essential
> "balance".
Yeah :-)
A good rule of thumb is to strive for at least a few [OT] posts for
each non-[OT] one. Flagging OT messages as OT is a good idea, though,
since some grumpy gramps here start to grumble a little (just a teensy
weensy wittle bit) when they see OT stuff not clearly marked as such.
Happy Muttin' from a fellow Mutter,
- Dave [who thinks you need to fix your MFT header]
--
Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?
It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right?
Please visit this link:
http://rotter.net/israel
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