For the past year or two I’ve mostly settled in to using the native Mac OS X mail program, which I like pretty well (keeping in mind that all my email is stored on the UW’s central IMAP servers, not on my Mac). There’s a lot to like about the Mac mail app – it does nice graphical things with keeping mail threads together, it handles forwards of multiple messages right (which Thunderbird doesn’t do), etc.
But every once in a while I go back to using Pine, and I’m always amazed at just how it’s got features which are so far ahead of any other mail program I’ve seen.
Today I was searching for someone’s mail address – I had searched through the From field in several folders with no success, when I realized that the person I was looking for had probably been copied on some group emails. Pine allows you to do a search on all of the “participants” in an email – so that searches the From, To, and CC fields at once – and sure enough that brought the address right up. How sensible can you get?
Oren Sreebny 