Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!microsoft!stevesc
From: stevesc@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Schonberger)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Suggestion for next Elm release
Summary: Elm doesn't need to do *everything*
Keywords: long
Message-ID: <7877@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 28 Sep 89 21:12:42 GMT
References: <819@umigw.MIAMI.EDU> <170@uwm.edu>
Reply-To: stevesc@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Schonberger)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 52

There have been a few notes suggesting how to get elm to work as the
mailer for various newsreaders.
	WHY ?
The reasons you use a mailer from a newsreader are very different from
the reasons you use a mailer by itself.  When using a mailer from a
newsreader there is one thing that you ordinarily want to do, and that
is to mail to the writer of the article.  Some people like to keep
copies for themselves too (myself included, frequently).
	elm is not the solution
Elm is wonderful for its intended purpose, reading mail, and
originating mail.  The good reply address parsing, aliases, header
editing, and so forth are all really handy for originating mail.  But
they don't do you any good in replying to news messages.  Why clutter
it with features to make it work better for something for which its
good points go to waste?
	the solution to the file copy matter in news replies
I really thought elm's ability to keep copies of outgoing mail was
neat.  I thought it would be a great feature to have in a newsreader's
mailer too.  I tried elm maybe twice and decided that wasn't a job elm
had any business doing.  There are two solutions.  One is to CC
yourself on any mail that's worth keeping.  That has the advantages
that you can deal with it in your mailbox with elm as you wish, and
that you only make copies of things that you want copies of.  The
disadvantage is that it's not automatic, and if you forget you don't
have a copy of it at all.  The other solution (which I've used), is to
use a shell script as your editor.  The shell script takes a file,
makes a copy of it in /tmp, and passes it to a real editor.  If the
file returned by the editor is the same as the copy in /tmp, you
ignore it.  If it's different, you do something like "echo `date | cut
-c??-??` >> ~/savemail ; echo other-elm-compatible-headers >>
~/savemail ; cat $maileditfile >> ~/savemail" in the script.  You can
have your newsreader use that shell script as its "editor" with a
newsreader dependent initialization line, possibly something like "set
NEWSEDITOR=~/savemaileditor" in .profile, .cshrc, or the
.(newsreader)rc file.
	shell scripts are easy!  shell scripts are fun!
Almost anything you can do in C can be done easier with shell scripts,
unless performance is a concern, or stuff like screen handling or
specialized system calls (like mailbox locking, in elm's case) are
needed.  A huge number of feature suggestions I read in comp.mail.elm
are very easy to solve with shell scripts (I recently added an "elmu"
c-shell alias for elm -f ~/Mail/[username] to read mail folders, for
example).  A lot of others can be solved by RTFM (Reading The Manual).
If you don't know how to write shell scripts, learn!  Or ask friends
in ways that challenge their creativity.  The elm developers (which
I'd love to have the time to be one of) have enough things to do that
can only be done well in C to bother with things that can easily be
done with shell scripts.

-- 
	Steve Schonberger	microsoft!stevesc@uunet.uu.net
	"Working under pressure is the sugar that we crave" --A. Lamb