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Comment by briandoll | Hacker News Reader

I built a fantasy football app in 1998 for WDVE in Pittsburgh, PA and had to act as the "Commissioner" to handle all disputes, complaints, and other interesting feedback, all via email, and as a person who couldn't give a shit about Football and never watched a game.

The backend was all perl, pulling data from stats.com or something like that. But the only way any of this was possible, was using terminal-based email (pine, not mutt, but similar enough).

Terminal-based email is a great example of a tool optimized for power users, and I'm realizing now that most of what I was able to do in Pine in 1998 I still can not do with any "modern" email client (I pay for Superhuman these days, which is still a far cry).

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Why not keep using Pine or the successor, Alpine? http://alpine.x10host.com/alpine/

I think it would take a significant effort to bring some of the features I love about Superhuman to a Pine-like workflow. (Definitely not impossible!) The one I use most of all is a reminder -- "punt this email to my Archive until next Thursday at 8AM" where it will then re-appear in my inbox. I do something like that a dozen times a day and would need a very reliable replacement for that.

Search in Pine is guaranteed to be better than Superhuman. Unfortunately, Superhuman uses stemming for _all_ search, and you literally can't turn it off. You can use quotes as much as you like, but search for "Shipped" and you'll find a billion emails with every permutation of the word "ship" in it. It's awful.

Out of interest, what sort of ways did pine help you in that sort of job?

Firstly, speed. Opening that mailbox with a GUI-based email application on a developer desktop was orders of magnitude slower, if it opened at all. The volume was just far more than most desktop email apps was used to at the time.

Secondly, it's unix, so you're operating a tool that allows you to construct ad-hoc workflows very quickly. There was a scoring bug where the stats software (literally a pipe-delimited text file that was updated by midnight the day of the game) had given a safety to the wrong player with the same name. I had hundreds of emails complaining about this bug, and I needed to fix it. I can search in Pine, find a result set (ie. everyone who mentioned this players unique name), compose an email to all of them (BCCd), and pull in a text file as the email body that I'd written previously, that explained how and when this would be fixed.

I had TONS of canned email responses, saved as text files, so finding a set of emails, and sending replies w/ the contents from a saved text file, was a very routine workflow that happened dozens of times a day for various situations.

I knew nothing about american football really, but with perl and pine, I felt like there was nothing I couldn't do.

Thanks for that reply. I'm sure there's many more people who would benefit from such a workflow if they knew how to work with one like that.

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