Google is like a dangerous drug.

Google is receiving the exact same feelings of admiration, respect, and trust as Microsoft once received. (Yes, back before it was known by all as an evil monopolist.) Some would say that Google has already passed that point and it's already obvious to them that Google is teh eeeevil.

But I'm hopelessly addicted to Gmail. As much as I want to NOT place my trust in Google, it's there.

It's soooo easy! And nice, and elegant. (although, today I noticed they are adding more color and details to it, which could be the edge of an approaching crapification front)

I would really rather use something on the command line. Maybe mutt, or alpine, or even gnus in emacs. But so far as I can tell, there is nothing that rivals gmail's features in a local application, much less in a console/terminal/command-line-interface/text-only application. Even Thunderbird (if I wanted to use it) doesn't come close.

I want the responsiveness, the local control, and the privacy of a locally run mail reader. But I also want threaded sorting that works. In fact, I don't even want to see the heirarchy of messages on a thread. I just want to see the subject line and when I select it, I want to go to the newest message in the conversation... I also want to see the first bit of the newest message next to that subject line. I want spam filtering that works really really well. I want labels and filters that are easy to set up. For that matter, I want the whole thing to be easy to set up, without having to figure out the difference between MUAs and MTAs and MDAs. So far it's MIA.

So I'm thinking maybe I'll just learn how the whole mail system works and start using the traditional unix "mail" command. Maybe that will give me the base of understanding that's necessary to set up mutt and postfix and some sort of spam filter in a way that approximates what I want... and then, maybe I can get some serious work done.