Slashdot Mirror

I used mh/nmh for a long, long time. The command-line tools were excellent for quickly filtering emails (thanks to bash and grep and each message being a file in a folder), but really, the tcl/tk exmh wrapper was what I really liked. It did what I wanted, using tools that worked, without me having to memorize all the tools and how they worked.

These days I just use gmail.

I use nmh with exmh as a GUI. It does all the above: sort by most recent, symbolic links to multiple directories, etc. The O'Reilly book is now freely (beer) available on the Web.

Command line tools can also be "GUI-fied": I've used exmh for a few years, and it's a prime example of "GUI-fying". And, yes, exmh supports PGP and GPG.

I'm almost ready to jump over Evolution to handle my email.

Currently, I use exmh, which I've found to be a great GUI interface to my email. It uses tcl and tk for the GUI and MH for folders, but has all kinds of extensions to support PGP, address books, in-line HTML display, etc.

Is anyone, familiar with both exmh and Evolution, able to point out their relative merits and detractions?

Basically, exmh rocks.

More:

I waver yet, wondering if I'll keep using exmh, or to consider VM inside emacs. I've tried netscape's mail interface and, despite many good features, I dislike not being able to use emacs as my text editor.

If all you want is a pretty interface, then maybe all you need is a basic GUI client. If you want power, though, you should look into MH, which allows you to do anything you could possibly want directly from a terminal window, or within one of several front ends (including a fine GUI client). You can even chain together commands to do complicated things (or write shell or Perl scripts that do), search, sort, and filter messages, have custom commands for writing to or replying to mail from mailing lists, and so forth. The big downside with MH is that each message is its own file, and each folder is a directory, which can mean some wasted disk space. On the other hand, having every message be its own file means that you can manipulate each message separately with shell or Perl scripts.

The main front ends for MH (outside of the various shell commands) are mh-e , an Emacs interface, and exmh , a TCL/Tk GUI client (previously mentioned by Tet). (xmh included with the X Window System, is severely outdated.) Several graphical clients can also be used as front ends for MH (although that support mostly consists of being able to read from or write messages to MH-style folders). (The links in this paragraph are to sections of the on-line version of O'Reilly's MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, now called MH & nmh: Email for Users & Programmers. How many other e-mail tools have an O'Reilly book dedicated to them?)

Emacs itself gives you several additional mail reading alternatives, including mh-e (of course), VM, rmail, MEW, and gnus, which is primarily a newsreader, but can also be used to read mail. (Especially good for very high-traffic lists, as it will do threading and scoring just like it does for newsgroups.)

Both exmh and mh-e (with mailcrypt) support PGP and GPG encryption, signing, and decryption.

If you don't just trust me and devote your life to MH, your best bet is to do a search on freshmeat and try all the mail clients that sound interesting. That's lots easier if you're using a Debian system or one with RPMs that will allow you to install packages, play with them, and then easily remove them and all their assorted fluff. As always, be sure to make a backup of your mail spool before you start messing around with it!

My first e-mail experiences were with VAXen and IBM mainframes. I started using MH with my first Unix account, and I've never found anything more powerful or flexible. I've tried lots of graphical clients, including Novell GroupWise 4, Eudora, Outlook, Communicator, Outlook Express, and NeXT's Mail.app, and found them all frustrating in one way or another.

My current setup uses nmh as the base system; exmh as my main reader; and mh-e for replying to mail. I use fetchmail to download my mail, and mailagent (from CPAN) to filter it, catching most spam and automatically filing real messages into the appropriate MH folders.

(To be perfectly fair, Outlook was the prettiest client I ever used, but it was still too complicated to set up and too limiting. Not to mention the nightmare that is Exchange.)

Subject says it all. exmh is a GUI front end to the all-powerful MH messaging system. It's written in Tcl, and has been stable for many years now. More details at http://www.beedub.com/exmh/.

On exmh's website there is information on what patches you need to get exmh up and running with PGP or GPG.