In a message dated: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 22:05:13 EDT
Derek Martin said:
>Today, Paul Lussier gleaned this insight:
>
>> I like pine, and it does have many great capabilities, but I've found
>> that exmh, overall, has all those capabilities, and then some. Of
>> course the "then some" is actually a result of the underlying 'mh'
>> mail system than it is of exmh.
>
>Paul, can you, for the benefit of me and the list, describe what features
>[e]*[x]*mh has that pine does not?
Oh yeah :) I kind of forgot about that, busy day.
Well, my single favorite feature is the manner in which it treats messages and
folders. Every "folder" is a unix directory, every "message" is an individual
file. This means that if you're looking for something in an e-mail, you can
use normal unix cmd line tools like sort, grep, awk, perl, etc. on the mail
files in each folder and find the exact message you're looking for.
Contrast this with grepping a normal BSD-type mail folder which is a single
file containing many messages. This may seem trivial, but if you're a packrat
(like me) and keep everything grepping through a file containing possibly
hundreds of messages is all but a waste of time. Say for instance, I know
someone on GNHLUG mentioned "jabber" in a URL within the last couple of days,
but I don't remember who. grepping for 'jabber' may turn up the URL, but I
want the From line so I can personally e-mail the person. With mh, this is as
simple as:
cd Mail/GNHLUG
grep jabber * | cut -f1 -d: | sort -u
1104
1105
1106
1107
1108
1109
1115
1116
1117
1120
This gives me 10 possibilities. Further use of the command line will provide
me with the From lines of each:
$ grep '^From:' `grep jabber * | cut -f1 -d: | sort -u`
1104:From: "Thomas Charron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1104:From: Bruce McCulley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1105:From: "Thomas Charron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1105:From: Bruce McCulley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1106:From: "Thomas Charron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1106:From: Bruce McCulley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1107:From: "Thomas Charron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1107:From: Bruce McCulley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1108:From: "Thomas Charron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1108:From: Bruce McCulley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1109:From: "Thomas Charron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1109:From: Bruce McCulley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1115:From: Thomas Charron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1116:From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1117:From: "Thomas Charron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1120:From: Derek Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
This tells me what message each person was mention in with the word jabber.
Now I have a lot more to go on, *and* can easily spend time on 10 or so
messages looking for what I want, rather than the 1121 in my GNHLUG folder, or
the last 50 or more that came through GNHLUG just today!
This is just my favorite feature. There are plenty others, especially within
exmh (the GUI which sits on top of mh).
mh features:
There's are files which control how your outgoing e-mail looks
both for originating e-mails, and replies. I can automatically
on a folder by folder basis change my To, From, Reply-to, Cc,
Fcc, Bcc lines. Actually, I can change any legal SMTP header line
that appears in an e-mail message. For instance. Say I monitor all
my GNHLUG mail at work via fetchmail to my home account. Normally
replying to this mail under Pine et. al. I would end up having a
Reply-to header set to one thing. But since I use procmail and filter
all my e-mail into a GNHLUG folder, I can simply configure all e-mail
I send from that folder to have a Reply-to listing my home e-mail
account. The from address may have my work address, but the Reply-to
doesn't.
mh has no "interface" like Mail, Pine, Elm, Emacs, etc. All of mh
is command level. You execute a command, and it operates as a filter
in the true Unix philosophy (read The Unix Philosophy, Mike gives
a great explanation of this) on information. There are folder level
commands, and message level commands. The output of either can be
redirected, piped, and further operated upon with other standard unix
commands. Ever curious how many messages you had in your GNHLUG
mail box, but didn't feel like firing up Netscape to count them?
$ folder +Mlists/GNHLUG
Mlists/GNHLUG+ has 1121 messages (1-1121); cur=1119; (others).
or
scan | wc -l
1121
Want to see the date, from, and subject of just the first 3 messages?
$ scan | head -3
1 12/15 Bob Lamothe gotta see it to believe it
2 12/19 "Jon 'maddog' Hal Talking about SouperComputers.....
3 03/01 "Rob Fowler" megaraid and RH 5.2 + kernel-2.2.7
Here's an example from the 'scan' man page:
For example, the command:
(scan -clear -header; show all -show pr -f) | lpr
produces a scan listing of the current folder, followed by
a formfeed, followed by a formatted listing of all mes�
sages in the folder, one per page. Omitting `-show pr -f'
will cause the messages to be concatenated, separated by a
one-line header and two blank lines.
Additionally, the filing capability with mh is tremendous.
I can have messages which show up in multiple mail boxes
should they fit multiple categories. This is done via
symlinks at the filesystem level! Adding to this
filing capability, you can essentially have infinitely deep
nested folders, or at least until your filesystem runs
out of inodes and/or directory entries :)
Exmh Features (here's where things get really cool :)
Auto signatures. I can choos which outgoing e-mails get which
signature based on domain name. I have both an external, and an
internal signature. My external you all see each time I post.
My internal, only my co-horts at work see to mail posted to
only internal addresses. This happens on the fly, and I never
think about it.
The ability to execute personal shell script upon an e-mail as I'm
composing or replying to e-mail. I actually wrote an auto-respond
script that all I have to do is select an e-mail and hit one key
which automatically replies to that e-mail and changes the message
accordingly (based on which key I hit). I have a standard canned
response for:
- You sent me a MS attachment and I deleted it
- Your e-mail was too sloppy and I deleted it
- Your e-mail had to many people on the To/Cc line and I
deleted it, leard about the Bcc field
Also, I have a tendancy to forward a lot of humor e-mail I get,
which has usally been forwarded many times, I can easily pipe that
e-mail through "sed 's/> >> > >>>>//'" and remove all that crap
and generally neated the e-mail up before I resend it so the
recipients will have an easy time reading what I forwarded them.
Many e-mail readers have the capability now of sending a URL
over to Netscape for viewing. Few have the ability to display the
actual web page within the client it self (at least to my knowledge)
exmh can be configured to play various sounds upon the receipt of
e-mail into a folder.
exmh can be used to send an X-Face header, and display them
(I know of no other e-mail client that can do this) this isn't
really anything more than a "Hey, isn't this a cool geeky thing
to do" feature :)
exmh has NNTP support (don't use it, don't know if it's any good).
exmh has glimpse support, which will index all of your e-mail
on keywords allowing for rapid keyword searching of all folders.
exmh has the best support of MIME that I've seen for a mail client
(Derek, the problems I used to exhibit were a misconfiguration issue
no a problem with exmh)
exmh automatically adds new addresses to my address book, and
supports auto-completion of addresses when sending e-mail
Well, I could go on and on. There are short-comings to it, but I find the
trade-offs well worth it. I'm not going to go into the short-comings now,
since I need a "bio" break :)
Ask me tomorrow if you're really interested!
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
"I always explain our company via interpretive dance.
I meet lots of interesting people that way."
Niall Kavanagh, 10 April, 2000
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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