I'm here to talk to you about pine and perl, and Thunderbird.
I haven't been able to get Tiger's updated Mail.app to connect to my IMAP server. Which sucks. Because as ugly as Mail.app clearly is, I always thought it worked ok, and I had high hopes for the new version.
So instead of switching to (the lame, emasculated and inadequate) Mail.app, I decided to give Thunderbird another try. Works great, for the most part. PGP works well with it, it doesn't choke on large mailboxes, etc. I wish I could export filtering rules and copy them among machines, but maybe someday I will be able to do that.
The main thing, though, was the address book. I wanted to get my pine .addressbook into TB. But TB's addressbook didn't know what to do with pine's format, and could only convert Entourage and Eudora addressbooks into the LDIF format it preferred. So, how?
perl, that's how.
After copying my .addressbook locally, I found a perl script on the net (somehow--most were accessible only to various university students) and pasted it into a pico window. (Yes, I know....I use emacs too.) Running perl pine2ldif addressbook.pine > addressbook.ldif spat out an LDIF that TB happily inhaled. (No groups, but hey...) I didn't have to install or configure perl.
It all just worked. How completely fantastic. But I ain't pressing my luck. So keep the noise down; I'll be trying to sleep through whatever bad shit is gonna happen next.