🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MURPHY.91Jan16174645@lam.dccs.upenn.edu> murphy@scotty.dccs.upenn.edu (L Murphy) writes:

   2)

   Has anyone written a good comparison of 
	   rmail
	   mh-e
	   vm

No, but here are some comments from my experience, as both a mail user
and the local emacs maintainer:

rmail advantages (used for 1-2 years long ago):
================

Part of the standard distribution.  Well documented in the standard
GNU Emacs manual.

rmail disadvantages:
===================

Uses a non-standard mail file format (BABYL), this has caused ongoing
problems.  A recent example:

    I get called by one of our system administrators one evening and
    told that our internal mail software has blown it again and
    stuffed 800++ bounce messages in a marketeer's mailbox.  Said
    marketeer complains that emacs crashes trying to read this mass of
    garbage.  Said sys admin doesn't know anything about emacs or
    babyl files.  Well, the good news was that it didn't crash my
    emacs.  The bad news was that rmail took 20+ minutes to produce a
    summary buffer and over an hour to manually delete all the bogus
    messages (yeah, I probably should have just gone in and hand
    edited the babyl file instead of using rmail).

Rmail's standard summary-mode support is very weak and quite slow.

mh-e advantages (switched to for a couple of years):
===============

Very good summary mode support.  I could and did live in the summary
buffer and only use message buffers to read individual messages.

Very powerful.

A complete, compatible set of shell level tools.  This made it easy to
read mail from dumb terminals, over slow lines, etc. when needed.
Some of the shell level tools were also useful for speeding up large
operations. 

mh-e disadvantages (really MH disadvantages):
==================

Uses a non-standard file format.  While the very complete set of MH
shell commands make this much less of a sys admin problem than babyl
format files, the number of the commands themselves complicates
installation and maintance and the file format makes many common MH
operations (e.g. read the next message) slow compared to other mail
agents. 

Slow.  While the MH propaganda line of "but the commands are soooo
powerful that you actually get more done in less time" is partly true,
MH is still slow for many things.  I suspect that newer tools like
MUSH provide most of the power of MH without the speed and
installation complexity.

vm advantages (my current mail interface):
=============

Uses the standard Unix mail file format.

Very powerful summary mode, as good as mh-e.

Pretty fast for most operations.

Well documented in its own texinfo file (i.e. printed manual and info node).

Actively maintained and enhanced by the author.

vm disadvantages:
================

Getting new mail can be slow because it rebuilds the summary buffer
from scratch each time (OK, it wouldn't take as long if I had less
than 400 messages in my inbox).

Not part of the standard emacs distribution.

Conclusion:
==========

All in all, I think VM should be the standard mail interface in V19
(but will be surprised if it happens).  I'm trying to convince local
users to switch to it.

--

                                            dan

In real life: Dan Pierson, Encore Computer Corporation, Research
UUCP: {talcott,linus,necis,decvax}!encore!pierson
Internet: pierson@encore.com