[Coco] Re: Re: Where's everybody goin'?

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/17/04 9:41:19 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
alxevans at concentric.net writes:

> Well, most GUI base e-mail clients lack a handful of basic (and 
>  important features) that were commonplace in CLI clients.  In addition 
>  to threading support, separate styles for forwarding and replying to 
>  messages and rot-13 support come immediately to mind.

What I REALLY miss from the good old days of Unix readmail or whatever it was 
called, is the ability to read a message, type 'd' for delete or "s filename" 
to save it by *appending* to a plain text file in your normal file system 
directories.

AOL and Outlook and lots of other "modern" GUI schemes insist on saving 
messages only within their own private munged up master file, which grows beyond 
reason and can't be worked on with Unix-style text searching and editing tools 
(like the shell scripts I had for cleaning out useless header info and .sigs).

AOL can save (export) a message to "real" file space, but only as a messy 
HTML file (even though it was received as plaintext), and will overwrite, not 
append to, an existing file name.  Plus you have to click, then type to do it.

ROT13 -- now there's a blast from the past.   Fond memories of punch lines 
and dirty or non-PC jokes done that way.  Haven't seen it in years.

>  Then again YAM 
>  is GUI based and supports these things.

I'd expect threading to be easier to work with in a GUI environment.  Could 
get messy in a CLI, which is not the best for traversing hierarchical trees of 
files (though we did it in UNIX for decades, just didn't enjoy it much :-).  
--Mike K.