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Grex > Oldcoop > #197: Is it time for Grex to stop offering e-mail? | |
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| 25 new of 71 responses total. |
albaugh
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response 25 of 71:
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Oct 23 02:28 UTC 2004 |
Never mind, that's just richard holding forth...
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gelinas
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response 26 of 71:
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Oct 23 03:26 UTC 2004 |
Re the last sentence of #24: It depends upon the size of the user base.
MTS-only mail was quite useful.)
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tod
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response 27 of 71:
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Oct 23 05:19 UTC 2004 |
re #24
I agree. THe first thing people learn on M-Net or Grex is how to do the
Internet e-mail.
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gregb
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response 28 of 71:
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Nov 5 19:28 UTC 2004 |
I must be an exception, though I had email before I started Grex. I
didn't even know Grex had email for a long time. My focus was on the
discussion groups.
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remmers
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response 29 of 71:
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Nov 6 13:17 UTC 2004 |
I suspect that these days, almost all Grex new users already have email.
It's much less of a hook to get people onto Grex than it was, say, ten
years ago.
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richard
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response 30 of 71:
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Nov 8 07:20 UTC 2004 |
right, and what also happens by grex offering email, is people running
listservs and other mailing lists through their emails, participating
in non-grex conferences instead of GREX conferences. If Grex's raison
d'etre is its conferencing, email might not be helping at this point.
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keesan
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response 31 of 71:
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Nov 8 14:23 UTC 2004 |
My grex mailbox is too small to use with a mail list and besides when I tried
it the mail from there bounced because grex was so slow so I had to set up
another account at sdf instead.
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albaugh
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response 32 of 71:
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Nov 8 19:55 UTC 2004 |
Would it be a storage / infrastructure problem if, on request - meaning that
a user actually logged in and new how to use grex e-mail and to whom to send
a request, an inbox size increase were granted, say in increments of 1M, or
a one-time grant to 5M?
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dpc
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response 33 of 71:
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Nov 11 14:24 UTC 2004 |
I use Grex for e-mail. I think we should stop trying to artificially
limit what folks do with Grex, and that we should upgrade our e-mail
to something modern.
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keesan
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response 34 of 71:
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Nov 11 14:31 UTC 2004 |
I like pine and mutt and mail. Do you know of something better that is
smaller and faster and text-only? What I would like is for someone to set
up mutt to automatically convert attachments sent in WORD or RTF format.
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blaise
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response 35 of 71:
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Nov 11 14:49 UTC 2004 |
If the PTB install wv, I can configure mutt to automatically use it for
Word and RTF files.
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blaise
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response 36 of 71:
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Nov 11 14:50 UTC 2004 |
Correction: I can provide the configuration file fragment to them that
will get mutt to automatically use it; they would need to add it to the
global muttrc file.
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twenex
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response 37 of 71:
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Nov 11 15:51 UTC 2004 |
MH is the only way! It's so Unixy!
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keesan
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response 38 of 71:
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Nov 12 01:07 UTC 2004 |
I have a copy of mutt set up to use catdoc for WORD and RTF. Are there
precompiled versions of wv and/or catdoc for OpenBSD? Can you also use Pine
this way?
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blaise
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response 39 of 71:
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Nov 12 17:07 UTC 2004 |
wv is in the BSD ports collection. I don't know about pine; I haven't
used it in years (since I switched to the more securely written mutt).
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keesan
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response 40 of 71:
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Nov 12 21:35 UTC 2004 |
I am told for mutt use .mailcp to set up catdoc etc for viewing msword docs
or rtf. application/msword catdoc %s
application/html lynx %s I think you also set up the applications in .muttrc
or somewhere. Jim, is there an xpdf for OpenBSD, or antiword or catdoc?
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blaise
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response 41 of 71:
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Nov 12 23:04 UTC 2004 |
That's .mailcap -- the entry for msword docs is what you showed; for rtf
docs it's application/rtf (application-name) %s
(I use rtfreader as neither antiword nor wv handles RTF, just Word
native formats. I've never installed catdoc; it might handle both.)
You do also need to add a line to the .muttrc (or global muttrc) file
for each MIME type you want to be viewed:
# These type of attachements will be shown inline
auto_view text/html
auto_view application/msword
auto_view application/octet-stream # Word documents frequently show as
octet-stream instead of msword.
auto_view application/rtf
It will then look in the mailcap file to determine how to view the
appropriate MIME type.
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dpc
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response 42 of 71:
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Nov 19 15:27 UTC 2004 |
I am proposing that on NextGrex we install a regular, modern,
e-mail program, with the capability of handling .doc, .pdf,
and other attachments. I'm really tired of telling folks they
can't send me this stuff at my Grex account, and have to use
my Comcast account instead.
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glenda
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response 43 of 71:
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Nov 19 16:46 UTC 2004 |
Actually, the reason I use Grex mail is so that I don't have to deal with
those sorts of things. I have another account where family and friends can
send attachments. Only family and friends have been given that address.
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marcvh
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response 44 of 71:
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Nov 19 17:45 UTC 2004 |
When you say "capable of handling" MS-Word and PDF documents, what
exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you want to be able to save
attachments and download them to your local machine, or do you want a
PDF viewer on Grex, or what?
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keesan
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response 45 of 71:
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Nov 19 22:40 UTC 2004 |
Mutt can be set up to use a WORD convertor to automatically decode .doc
attachments - antiword, catdoc (also does RTF), or wv will work. The new pine
will automatically display html as text and go to URLs with lynx. There is
a pdftotext program that could be compiled to deal with pdf files to extract
the text parts of them. But generally .doc and .pdf files are so full of
garbage (fonts, colors, tables) that they won't fit into a grex mailbox
anyway. Can you train your friends to convert their .doc's to text before
sending?
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janc
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response 46 of 71:
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Nov 22 19:50 UTC 2004 |
There can be no regular modern e-mail client programs on Grex.
Everything that can reasonably be understood as a "regular modern" mail
client, (eg, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird) needs a windowing
systems to run on, so basically they have to run on the computer that is
sitting on the desk in front of you, not on some far away server.
Those programs do, however, have the capability of accessing mail stored
on some other computer, using the POP or IMAP protocols. Right now Grex
does not have a POP or IMAP server. Installing such a server on Grex
would be very easy, technically speaking. With such a server, users
could read their Grex mail using any client they have on their home
computers.
The argument in the past has been that we don't want people to do this,
because we want them to log in to Grex to fetch their mail, increasing
the chances that they will take advantage of other Grex services. Of
course, now we have some Grex services, like conferencing via Backtalk,
that don't exactly require logging into Grex. Another anti-POP argument
has been that Grex doesn't want to offer first-class mail service
because mail already eats up too much of our resources. One might
consider allowing POP only for members. This would be very viable to do
within Grex's resource limitations. However past philosophy has been to
keep member perks to a minimum. Also under current policy an account is
expired if there is not a telnet or backtalk login in 3 months. Would a
POP login count too?
The mail server software on Grex is sendmail (exim on nextGrex). These
are very much regular and modern. Well old Grex's sendmail is a bit
old.
The mail client software on Grex all assumes that you don't have a GUI.
Pine, mutt, etc. Most of these have the capability to save attachments
as files. They do not, of course, have any very adequate ability to
display things like pdf files or word documents. You'd have to
download the files to your home system where you can use a GUI viewer to
view them.
Actually, it is theoretically possible to run GUI applications on Grex,
using a X-windows client on your home computer and a server on Grex. I
don't know much about this, but I think it would be slow, clumsy and
useful to only a small set of users.
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janc
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response 47 of 71:
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Nov 22 20:05 UTC 2004 |
Maybe a better alternative would be to offer a web-based email client on
Grex, something similar to squirrelmail. Users would be able to access
their mail by going to a web page. It would be able to display any
attachment that your browser can display.
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tod
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response 48 of 71:
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Nov 22 21:15 UTC 2004 |
Squirrelmail would be nice if the spam mail filtering plugin is enabled.
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keesan
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response 49 of 71:
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Nov 22 23:51 UTC 2004 |
The word files people send me are just text with a lot of garbage added and
could very well be displayed as text using a convertor. Same for rtf or
excel. Joe already set pine up to display html using lynx.
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