🚀 go-pugleaf

Here are the results from an informal comparison between mew and mh-e
(with the tm package for MIME support). Both mew and mh-e are GNU
emacs interfaces to the MH package. Both packages have MIME support in
this configuration.

Version numbers are: mew-0.98 and mh-e 5.0.1 (the version packaged
with GNU Emacs 19.29). The latter in combination with tm-6.80.1


Points I looked for:

 1. Mew has menus. This is a very big plus when you're just learning
    an emacs mode or when you're testing it.
    It saves you from a lot of flicking between documentation and the
    mode, and it gives you a nice overview of its capabilites.
    It also makes it an easier sell to other people.

 2. Reading MIME multipart messages:
    mh-e/tm shows multipart MIME messages like this:
     [text/plain]
     some text
     ...
     [image/gif]
     [application/octetstream funnyfile.tar.gz]
    All message parts are headed by their type shown in brackets. The
    displayable message types (text/plain, text/enriched(?)...more?)
    are shown. Undisplayable message types, like images or sounds, are
    tucked away.
    Tm provides commands to navigate between message parts
    ("attachments"), and to "play" them (display them with an external
    program of some sort) or extract them to a file.

    Mew shows the message parts of multipart messages in the summary
    buffer, like this
      10  10/05 Steinar Bang     A test mail message
        	1	text/plain	
        	2	image/gif	
    and you can navigate between message part the same way you
    navigate between individual messages

 3. Replying to a multipart message:
    When yanking a multipart message in mh-e/tm, you're yanking the
    message as displayed over (ie. a binary attachment, like a GIF,
    will not show up as an attachment in the quoted message).

    In mew it seems that you can reply to the displayable message
    parts, and that you can forward the entire message, or the
    displayable message parts.
    I did this test by navigating to different message parts and
    attempting to reply and to forward them.

 4. Composing MIME messages:
    mh-e/tm uses Masanobu Umeda's mime-mode ("mime.el") to compose
    mime messages. mew uses a mime composing mode of its own. This
    mode has menus to help in the composition.


Conclusion:

Mew scores highly on having menus. Its approach to handling multiparts
is original, and I think the easiest one of the two to understand for
someone who hasn't encountered MIME before.

I prefer the mh-e approach, however. This has two reasons:
 1. this was the way I envisioned a MIME mail reader when I was
    reading the MIME draft in 1993
 2. you have better control over how you view the message. You can
    toggle between displaying the parsed MIME message and the raw MIME
    message. 
But your milage may vary.

When composing messages, I prefer the mh-e/tm approach, simply because
they use Supercite and mime.el, which I'm familiar with from VM and
GNUS. But again: the mew menus would give mew an advantage to those
not already familiar with these packages.

So I guess what I'm saying here, is that Mew is probably the best
alternative for those who hasn't used a GNU Emacs MUA before, but
personally I have started using its "rival" mh-e/tm

And to the people who gave us *all* of these packages, I'd just like
to say "thank you!" and "keep up the good work!"


- Steinar