From: dboyes@is.rice.edu (David E Boyes)
Subject: Re: ELM vs PINE
Organization: Rice University
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 16:47:03 GMT

In article <j+jpm5_@lynx.unm.edu> hamjavar@carina.unm.edu (Farid Hamjavar) writes:

>I am suppose to do a comparison between ELM and PINE (you never heard of
>PINE before!!! :-)  This comparison is mostly in terms of functionality
>from users' perspective and a bit from maintenance of the mail-program
>point of view.

Elm can do more, and is more open-ended than Pine, but Pine is
simpler for the utterly technophobic user. Pine's other major
advantage is direct support of the IMAP remote mailbox access
protocol, which makes it easier for users to have a single
mailbox that's accessible from many different hosts, including
personal computers.

Pine is very menu-driven -- everything you can do at any point is
always visible on the screen in a function key-like display at
the bottom of the screen. It uses inverse video a lot, so if you
have Televideo terminals or other terminals where the inverse
video attribute takes up a character location on the screen, you
may have trouble with screen formatting. I circumvented that
problem by redefining the inverse video sequence for the
afflicted terminals to something innocuous, like half-intensity. 
Address book functions are very visually oriented, and seem
well-thought out.

Elm is somwhat menu-driven, but more command driven than Pine. It
can be configured to use any available editor and printing
software, and has bozo/moderate/expert user modes to limit the
complexity visible to the user. It also comes with a nice set of
mail handling tools that every system should have: a rul-based
mail filter, frm, a well-behaved autoreply daemon, other stuff.

MIME support (a big up-and-coming issue in mail user agents) is
available for both Elm and Pine, but the Elm MIME support available
from Bellcore is much more sophisticated at this stage (as of
Pine 3.05). 

pico, the editor piece of Pine, is very nice as an editor,
though. It's simple, and has a number of useful features for
users who don't want to, or have no need to use a traditional
Unix editor like vi or Emacs. The combination of Elm and pico
seems to be a nice intermediate environment for someone who's
outgrown Pine, but doesn't need the full power of Emacs. (pico
has the basic Emacs cursor movement controls in addition to arrow
key support. For people who move back and forth between pico and
Emacs, this is a real blessing. It also deals nicely with the
case of non-ANSI terminals.)

Both are relatively easy to build and configure -- Elm is
slightly easier due to their use of Larry Wall's superb Configure
scripts. You have to tell the Pine build program what
architecture you're on; the Elm Configure script figures it out
and goes for it. Elm also supports more different kinds of
machines. 

Pine really shines with the IMAP support. If your host supports
an IMAP server (available on the same FTP site as Pine), you can
manipulate your mailbox using Unix clients, Mac clients and
(soon) a DOS client without having to move the entire mailbox to
the local host (as is the case with POP2/POP3 based servers). I
have heard that there are mods to Elm available to support POP
and IMAP, but I haven't tested them, so I don't know if/how well
they work.

>I've got a load of documents to read on ELM but not as much for PINE.

In the tech notes that come with Pine (available via anonymous
FTP from ftphost.cac.washington.edu), they mention that one of
the design goals of Pine was to minimize the external
documentation needed to use the package. The help files that are
part of Pine constitute most of the available documentation, and
you probably won't really need much more than that. There's a
help key on every screen - usually ? or H - and it's context
sensitive. 

Your best bet with Pine is to build it and mess with it. It takes
about 3M of disk space on my Sparcstation for the source and executables.

>a) Anybody knows where can I get more to read on PINE?

It's all on ftphost.cac.washington.edu.

>b) I was wondering if I could get even more  info.  by asking if anybody
>   has worked with both and could tell me his/her opinion :-)

Personal opinion:

Pine is perfect for technophobic users who must use a Unix system
for other tasks, or environments where it's really handy to have
one mailbox per user accessible from many different locations.
Assuming that you have network connectivity available to your
personal computers, really technophobic users that just need to
send and receive mail should consider using a personal computer
based IMAP client like Mailstrom for the Mac (FTP from
ftphost.cac.washington.edu) or Pine for DOS (when it becomes
available) -- they'll get more comfortable with electronic mail
that way and (hopefully) be better equipped to cope with future
advances. 

I think that as users get more experienced, they'll outgrow Pine
and want something more powerful, like Elm. The pico editor is a
nice piece of work in itself, and I think it works well with both
Pine and Elm. Power users who are familiar with Unix editors and
the Unix environment will definitely prefer Elm.

Right now, the MIME support in Pine is pretty weak. They're
working hard on it, but the Bellcore stuff for Elm is still much
superior. If MIME support is important to you and you have widely
distributed network access to support X, you may want to consider
the Andrew mail system, which handles MIME beautifully.


>
>Farid Hamjavar
>The guru is inside you.


-- 
David Boyes
dboyes@rice.edu