OFF: e-mail clients

Guido Vacano gvacano at BEAVER.MBB.WESLEYAN.EDU
Sun Jun 1 09:42:42 EDT 1997


Paul says--

> > curious, since MSIE is free, and seems to do what needs done, why use
> > anything else?

Because I don't like Microsoft's questionable marketing practices?
Because there are plenty of Unix mailers that provide more functionality?
Because I don't want ms-tnef nonsense appended to my epistles and
wasting bandwidth? :-)

> > this is a real question and not sarcasm. i wonder what other benefits are
> > out there with different browsers/readers. i have used netscape, eudora,
> > and this (MSIE). no differences worth noting, as far
> > as I could tell.

Well, they're all Windows programs, so I'm not too surprised.

> It's not much use on the DEC OSF, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX,
> and PC Linux systems I use most of the time.  (All are unix systems; all
> cannot run MSIE etc.)  Also (and this is probably only a problem local
> to me:) is that my home PC is so ancient by today's standards (a donated
> 386SX-16 w/ 5MB of RAM and 40MB hard disc) it doesn't have the resources
> necessary to run Windows 95 and MSIE, and so I don't have the option of
> running them (even if I had the inclination).  However, the PC runs Linux
> fine and dandy, and so I can use Pine for e-mail (which has better
> functionality than MS Internet Mail anyway, albeit without all that eye
> candy).  But then again, this is from someone who uses Lynx as their main
> WWW browser. :-)

Do you use Pine on a remote host (like I'm doing now (well, elm actually)),
or do you have a SLIP connection, or are you using term (a pseudo-SLIP
connection between two Unix machines)? You can use Netscape over a term
connection (I think--last time I set up a term connection, I was using
Mosaic). It worked fine, even with the crappy little 2400 modem I had
then. :-) Of course, with a 40 MB hard drive, you probably don't have
XWindows (though it does run nicely on a 386). :-)

Guido

--
If nothing is done, then all will be well.  -- Lao Tse



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