🚀 go-pugleaf

As quoted from <926@trotter.usma.edu> by bill@trotter.usma.edu (Bill Gunshannon):
+---------------
| In article <905@bdmrrr.bdm.com>, shprentz@bdmrrr.bdm.com (Joel Shprentz) writes:
| > Can anyone comment on how Mush, the mail user's shell just posted to 
| > comp.sources.unix, compares with Elm or MH?
| > 
| 
| I can't comment on MUSH yet because I am missing parts 7-12 but I can tell
| you that although ELM works fine on the 3B2 that I am writting this on it
| does have some problems.  I have been trying for some months now to get it
| run on an INTEL 310 without success.  Don't get me wrong, it isn't ELM's 
| fault, the compiler on the INTEL is a disaster.  It is also inconsistent.
| It has some of the system calls for SYSV and some for V7. Makes for some
| interesting programming.
| 
| MH is a new one to me but if someone can send me the sources I would be 
| willing to give it a try too.  Almost anything is better than vanilla mail.
+---------------

If you thought Mush was big, wait until you see MH!  BTW, you'll have even
worse problems with MH:  it wants either sendmail or MMDF, and is workable
but extremely unsatisfying if you have neither.  Also, if you have neither
you have to kiss BellMail goodbye:  MH-MTS (the delivery scheme used if
you don't have sendmail or MMDF) wants to write mailboxes in MMDF maildrop
format rather thsn Bell-compatible format.

As for differences:  I can't speak about Mush (didn't even look at it; heck,
I've got MH and my own IMS is in the queue for a rewrite), but MH and Elm
I have used, and they have radically different philosophies.  I suspect from
the name that Mush is closer to MH than Elm, but...

Elm is a mail user agent contained in a single program plus a few auxiliary
programs; the intent is that all mail sending/reading/manipulating is done
with the Elm program itself.  It attempts to provide a wide range of capa-
bilities, but because it is a single program its capabilities are ultimately
"fixed" -- difficult to augment.  On the plus side, it's relatively small
(see below; I'm not talking mailx/ucbmail or BellMail) and has a pleasant,
easy-to-use full screen interface.

MH, on the other hand, is a collection of utilities for generating and
manipulating RFC822-compatible messages.  Note that it is not limited to
mail; MH 6.5 has support for "bboards", which are a cross between news and
mail: submissions are mailed to an alias which saves them into a special
mailbox, and standard MH utilities can be used to manipulate these mailboxes
even though they are read-only to the majority of readers.  The utilities
implement _parts_ of a mail user agent; the "utility" connecting them is
your favorite shell, supported by Unix files and pipes.  This means that if
you want to implement a new command, you can write a shell script to do it;
there are low-level utilities which can essentially turn _any_ command or
program into an MH command.  I, personally, swear by it.  However, if you're
interested in stuff that doesn't require (or at least want) the user to be a
shell guru, Elm is the better choice. (MH is definitely the mailer for "power
users".)

[My own IMS is somewhere in between; it's a single program which can be used
as a regular mailer or as building blocks, depending on how it is invoked.
The current version isn't as intelligent as it could be and has a few known
bugs, but there are still users who swear by it.]
-- 
	    Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc
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