[Alpine-info] top feature requests

[Dan Mahoney, System Admin]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2011, Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik wrote:


> :2011-03-04T11:15:Daniel Fetchinson:

>

>> Hi folks,

>>

>> (Al)pine is really a great tool, I've been using it happily for about

>> 17 years. It makes reading/writing email simple, fast and efficient.

>> But there are a couple of quirks that come up from time to time and

>> are somewhat annoying but by far not on the level that would make me

>> with up (al)pine completely. Consider these as mild annoyances.

>> Nevertheless I thought I would share my top list of feature requests

>> which would make (al)pine even better in my opinion.

>>

>> 1. Tab completion of email addresses using the address book while

>> typing To: or Cc: field.

>

> It does that. Even does it through to an LDAP server.

>

> [X]  Enable Tab Completion  (default)

>

>> 2. Ability to delete attachments from a saved email (while keeping the

>> email text body).

>

> Hmmm interesting.


Um, this exists, I think.  I have the ability to delete attachments, which 
only takes effects when the message is saved from my inbox to some other 
folder.


>> 3. Ability to define default path to save attachments to. Currently it

>> is the directory where (al)pine was launched.


Oh, for sure -- I've gotten around this by symlinking several "short" 
folder names, i.e. save message to dl/foo, or whatnot.


> Hmm would be nice but it also does tab completion.

>

>> 4. Ability to save all attachments with a single action, whenever possible.


a) I've pushed (in several cases) for a message filter syntax that 
included the ENTIRE message, immediately before it was handed off to the 
mailer, which is useful for signatures, virus scanners, bayes functions, 
hashcash, and others.  I've asked eduardo for patches and gotten some 
interest but haven't heard back.  This is as simple as defining a 
per-message "alternate sendmail" path, prompted for at send-time.

b) I'd love to make the S/MIME support work -- there's some issues with 
receiving an encrypted AND signed message that I suspect is simply a 
double-call to openssl that could be easily fixed, but C is not my first 
language.  Neither crispin (when he read this list) nor chappa, nor barton 
seemed able to help there, but I *strongly* suspect it's trivial amounts 
of C, like a misplaced bracket, since I'm able to export a "problem" 
message and parse it easily with raw /usr/local/bin/openssl.

c) I'd love to see some url-shortener addons, perhaps added into /contrib, 
coupled with a cgi that let you "view" them, so hitting 
www.mydomain.com/short/foo completed some longer url.  In some 
pie-in-the-sky world I'd be happy for a standard protocol that let url's 
be pushed over an ssh-connection, but failing that, I'll stick with 
sendim.sh or sendxmpp or something I could click without relying on my 
ssh app knowing what defines a url.

Also in some perfect world there would be an apache auth_ module that only 
let me into a directory if I was logged onto ssh from the same IP, by 
checking wtmp.  It's not an alpine request but, you know, since we're 
asking.

-Dan

-- 

--------Dan Mahoney--------
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