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