Alpine Messaging + Gmail + OSX

Monday 7 April 2008 - Filed under technology

I decided to subscribe to a bunch of Cocoa mailing lists, as in Mac OS X cocoa framework in preparation of the hairy ride I’d be subjected to as I try to come to grips with Objective-C and all the other technology required to master development for the Apple platform.

I use Gmail exclusively and while I love web interfaces, these things still don’t scale for large sets of data as you’re basically sending out a massive number of http requests or doing some other batch operation.  That’s not to say Google does it better than anyone else.  I couldn’t simply archive all the mailing list traffic as I need to ramp up my familiarity but I knew that reading my email on the Gmail web interface, despite the ajax keyboard shortcuts wouldn’t scale either.

So I went back to Alpine, the successor to the very famous unix pine email client with a more liberal license that supposedly scales better.  Either way, zipping through the inbox with alpine and keyboard navigation scales for me.  I just need to glance through the email quickly and then file them away with a succession of keyboard commands that will sooner or later register in my muscle memory.

With Gmail’s IMAP support I get to keep the web interface when I really need search while syncing the message state between lables/folders.

Alpine Messaging System—

ii.com · Power Pine: Getting the Most Out of Unix-, Mac- & PC-Pine by Nancy McGough

2008-04-07  »  baron