Or how to use the Internet, part 1. Darren Irvine picks out the best email systems.
When you're trying to decide on an email system to use on your Amiga, there are three main types to consider. First, a number of popular UNIX mail systems have been ported more or less successfully on to the Amiga, including Pine and the ubiquitous Elm.
The second option is to use a purpose-designed Amiga mailer and, although this would be my recommendation, the problem is that there is really only one piece of software available - a program called simply Mail which was developed by Demon Internet for their own customers, and which is now available as PD.
The third choice, which may be attractive if you use Fidonet as well as Internet email, is to use a gating system and a Fido mailer such as Spot to deal with both sorts of email.
One complaint that Elm has always attracted is that it is very fiddly to set up - you need a whole range of UNIX-style directories and assignments to implement the UUCP sub-system expected by Elm.
If you eventually manage to get the thing installed and configured properly, and can bring yourself to ignore the 1970s-style user interface, you will discover that Elm is in fact a fairly useful mailer. Like most other systems, the operation is based on the concept of a series of mail folders - one for incoming mail, one for outgoing mail, one for email from irrational magazine editors - you get the idea.
The range of mail-sending and receiving tasks - just about every combination of replying, forwarding, group replying, and message bouncing - are all made pretty easy by the program, which, let's face it, is why Elm has remained in existence for such a long time and why it has proliferated on to a wide range of platforms from its humble UNIX workstation beginnings.
If you want to be able to receive more than just text in your email, you'll be glad to know that Elm also supports the viewing of MIME messages in a fairly straightforward manner, using the external program Metamail.
Using still another external program, Metatools, which incidentally requires the Magic User Interface, you are also able to paste together outbound MIME messages, including text, graphics files and sound samples. Of course, setting up both of these programs also requires a fair amount of effort, the worth of which will depend on how much MIMEing you actually intend to do.
Pine 3.91: another port of a well known UNIX system and, like Elm, it really is just a port rather than an actual Amiga version.
Pine runs in a text-only manner in a resizeable window on your Workbench, and this time you really are stuck with keyboard-only operation.
Although in theory Pine is a more comprehensive system than Elm, the fact that the programmers have not implemented any Amiga-style functionality whatsoever effectively rules it out as a serious contender.
This drawback, plus the fact that you need to be running AmiTCP 4.0 or better (only the demo of which is available as Public Domain) - and have an unwieldy UNIX support library installed - really makes Pine a non-starter.
