Mail User Agent Discussion
 

Dear Slackers,

I use nmh with MH-E and I love it. However, I have been considering using Mutt or Alpine instead. The reason is that nmh seems to have a smaller use base than Mutt, and people rave about Mutt. I can only find out what all the raving is about if I use it.

I know what you're thinking: "If you like nmh, just keep using it!" So, what I want to know from Mutt or Alpine (or other MUA) users is why do you use it, and what does it offer over nmh?

To aid the discussion, here's what I like about nmh:

1. It uses the filesystem (stores each mail as a file, each folder is a directory)
2. It is effectively non-interactive (but can be made interactive with MH-E)
3. It delegates to external programs (and is, in fact a set of programs; html formatted email takes me to lynx where I can browse if I want after reading the email)

Other things I value:

1. NOT storing mail in some unique format
2. console use (I'm not going to use Evolution, Thunderbird or Kmail)
3. interaction with Emacs (if I feel like it at the moment)

So none of those are unique to nmh, but they could affect my choice. The big question is: "What factors outside of the user experience should play a large role in which piece of software to use for a very important task?"

Thanks,
Joel

Mutt can use the MH mailbox format, so you could give it a trial and easily revert to MH.

I have always used mutt interactively and am not sure whether it can be made non-interactive.

Good point: I have thought about doing that for a week just to see how I like it. I think that is a good option. I have also been trying Mutt at home on my Ubuntu box. The hilarious thing was that it had to install sendmail, mailx, ... all the stuff that Slackware has automatically --- as "dependencies" --- just to install Mutt.

The non-interactive quality is nice, but I don't use it very much. It's nice, for example because I can use mhstore, mhlist and so on to save parts of emails and manipulate them using Unix tools.

I use the nmh Slackbuild, so I could get the maintainer's thoughts on these issues, too.

Thanks for writing back,
Joel