gmail vs pine

<a href="http://washington.edu/pine/"
  <img src="pine.png"></a>
<img src="gloves.jpg">
<a href="http://gmail.com/"><img src="gmail.png"></a>

_Note: this article was written in February 2005. The ideas still apply, but
many of the technical details about Gmail and Pine have changed. Caveat reader!_

I've used [Pine](http://washington.edu/pine/) as my email client for, well,
pretty much forever. I use it because it's fast, powerful, stable, and very
keyboardable. (I _hate_ the mouse.)

However, since I work at [Google](http://google.com/), I'm constantly bombarded
with people who ask me why I don't use [Gmail](http://gmail.com/). After hearing
the nth person brag about how much it increased their productivity, I finally
broke down and tried it. I didn't expect much, since I've never liked web-based
email clients. However, I made myself use it as my _only_ email client, for a
month, to give it a fair shot.

I ended up using it for five weeks, and while I eventually switched back to
Pine, I liked Gmail a lot more than I expected. It made me question lots of
things I took for granted, and showed me that there's plenty of innovation left
in email clients. I'm currently [writing patches for
Pine](software#patches) to implement the features I miss most from Gmail.
(Many people have gone the other direction and written [Greasemonkey scripts for
Gmail](http://dunck.us/collab/GreaseMonkeyUserScriptsSpecific#head-2b681c0a24baff8899d7163cc7f805c75e1f44e4)
to add features and customize it to their liking.)

Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly of Gmail, compared to Pine. My opinions
are not those of my employer, look both ways before crossing the street, don't
run with scissors, etc.

### The Good

  * It's somewhat faster than your average IMAP server. (Of course, this is both
a success of Gmail and a failing of most IMAP servers.)

  * Gmail is smart about hiding quoted text and emails i've seen. This _rocks_.
Somehow it even knows the 1% of cases where I actually do want to see the quoted
text. I have no idea how.

  * The UI for threading, or
[conversations](http://mail.google.com/mail/help/learn_more.html#conversation)
in Gmail lingo, rocks even harder. The killer feature is that the _bodies_ of
all messages in the thread on a single screen. Combined with hiding quoted text,
this is very powerful.

  * Mail is indexed. My average search takes under a second in Gmail, but around
10 seconds in Pine.

  * [Tags](http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0405d.shtml), aka labels or virtual
folders, are all the rage these days. GMail's implementation of them is slick,
and eminently usable. Pine's
[keywords](http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/pc/#keywords) offer most of
the same functionality, but compared to Gmail, they're a little clunky.

  * There are [keyboard
shortcuts](http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=6594)!
Wonder of wonders, it's a webapp that has keyboard shortcuts. Even more amazing,
I can actually do most of my normal email tasks with the keyboard shortcuts
_only_. If I couldn't, I never would have given Gmail a second glance.

  * I love the Y key, a single keystroke for archiving email. Archiving in pine
takes two keystrokes at best, and four if I last saved to a different folder
than my "archive" folder.

  * The address book is great, mostly because I _never have to use it_. Gmail
automatically remembers everyone I've sent email to or received email from, and
auto-completes when I start type their name or email address. I wish Pine did
this!

### The Bad

  * Filtering has a great UI, but it's horribly weak. It has maybe a third of
the headers and options that I normally filter on. Even with labels, the set of
filter actions is anemic.

  * There's no way to bounce an email. This should be pretty trivial to add.

  * If no email is selected, the Y key should archive the email under the
cursor. This should be common sense.

  * You can't automatically create a filter based on an email. Why not?

  * You can search, but you can't _select_ messages based on headers, subject,
or body text. Worse, if you have more messages than fit on the screen, you can't
select any messages that aren't on the screen. If you ever get flooded with
email, or with spam that escapes the spam filters, god help you.

### The Ugly

  * Marking messages as read is impossible with the keyboard, and takes three
clicks with the mouse: Select ___, More Actions, Mark As Read. I could just
leave them unread, but then the labels display is useless for showing which
mailing lists have new mail.

  * Selecting a message doesn't automatically move the cursor to the next
message. This is just plain silly.

  * The Y key is horribly inconsistent. If you're in the Inbox, it archives. If
you're in a label, it removes the label. If you're in spam or trash, it moves to
the Inbox! Granted, if you consider Inbox as just another label, this makes
sense...but that's a pretty odd perspective.

  * Gmail might be smart about (not) displaying quoted text, but it can't handle
_composing_ with quoted text to save its life. There are a ton of problems with
this, but among others, it needs a way to [remove trailing quotes when
sending](pine_remove_trailing_quote_patch). (OK, to be fair, I doubt this
feature is in high demand.)