On Jan 15, 18:00, Max Eskin wrote: you Mostly that it has a very broken idea of how to handle dates; it insists on parsing the date in the "From" line in order to validate it, and gets upset if it can't. When things go wrong, it has a habit of believing that two messages are in fact one (the one with the unparsable date being concatenated to the preceeding one). I also fail to see why pine, alone amongst the dozens(?) of mail programs around, has to have a control message at the top of a mailbox: a message which confuses anyone who subsequently uses another mailer; which gets moved to a different place if another mailer re-sorts the mailbox (making the control message useless to pine, which inserts another copy and actually displays the old one); and which typically gets removed by any POP3 server that accesses the mailbox for a remote user (so pine has to replace it again). It has a crazy insistence on having certain terminal capabilities in order to work... and refuses to run if they are not detected, despite the fact that it actually contains code to get round many of the things it claims to need (such as clear-to-end-of-line). There are also some bugs to do with clearing lines on terminals with a minimal set of capabilities -- notably when going backwards and forwards from the setup and addressbook menus. It's possible to get pine into a state where the display is unusable until you quit, reset the display (usually scrolling a screenful is enough, though) and restarting. It doesn't let you add headers other than a small set of pre-defined ones, which are sometimes necessary -- though beginners might not need to do that. IMNSHO, a mail program and a news program are two different things -- and pine's news capabilities are pretty poor. And, of course, it's BIG. Compare the size of a pine executable to the size of other MUAs on the same platform. It *does* have some nice features -- but for me, both as a user and a sysadmin, they're far outweighed by the shortcomings. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Dept. of Computer Science University of York