Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!columbia!cunixc!fuat
From: fuat@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu (Fuat C. Baran)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: MH verses the "all in one file" MUAs
Message-ID: <1784@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 16 Aug 89 00:14:02 GMT
References: <113461@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1518@cbnewsc.ATT.COM> <113567@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: fuat@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu (Fuat C. Baran)
Organization: Columbia University Center for Computing Activities
Lines: 50

In article <113567@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> island!argv@sun.com (Dan Heller) writes:
>But what really took the cake for me was the fact that if your mail is
>configured for MH, there's no other UA you can use-- you are stuck with MH.
>What if I told you I had an editor I'd like you to try but told you that
>if you used this editor, you can't use any other editor on files you edit
>using that editor.  This is how I see MH's folder format.  What saves MH
>is the fact that there is no "standard" (even proposed standards or RFCs)
>which discuss folder formats or anything similar.

I am one of the authors of MM, a MUA written here at Columbia
University, based on the TOPS-20 (DEC-20) program MM.  One of the
future Beta releases of MM will have support for MH format mail
folders.  (Currently MM can only read/write mbox, mail.txt and babyl
format files, but in order to experiment with performance improvements
(large files take time to read/write) we are working on MH format).
Also, with the addition of a few "bboard" commands, we plan on giving
our users a simpler interface to netnews.

[Note: MM is still in Beta test, though it is used at quite a few
places on a daily basis.  MM uses CCMD (our version of the TOPS-20
COMND Jsys, for those of you familiar with DEC20's) to provide
command/keyword completion, help on '?', etc.  For more info send mail
to info-mm-request@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu.]

>Upon further investigation, I learned that MH wasn't portable to any other
>unix besides BSD systems.  This may have changed lately -- I don't keep up
>with MH that much (my loss, I guess).  Is it true that MH still only talks
>to sendmail as its sole MTA?

This is true for MM as well, though one of our beta testers is working
on a zmailer interface, and it should be fairly easy to make it use
other MTA's in the future (especially after a bit of cleanup in the
code).

>As you said, MUAs are as religious as using different editors -- you're
>never going to convince an emacs user to use vi, and chances are unlikely
>that you're going to convert an MH user to use Mush (altho there are some
>cases where this has happened :-).

Yup.  :-) One of our main motivations in writing MM is that we had a
large user population migrating from DEC20's to UNIX machines, and MM
was one of the top things they wanted.


						--Fuat
-- 
INTERNET: fuat@columbia.edu          U.S. MAIL: Columbia University
BITNET:   fuat@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu           Center for Computing Activities
USENET:   ...!rutgers!columbia!cunixc!fuat      712 Watson Labs, 612 W115th St.
PHONE:    (212) 854-5128                        New York, NY 10025