Hey Predrag,
Since I'm the one that brought up this issue, I figure that I could
comment on your suggestion...
I was wondering if you guys could clarify something for me. I
looked heirloom mailx (nail) very carefully and it looks like
mail on steroids. One of the reasons that I personally stop
using mail long time ago was that I could not attach the files
to it. I looked the man pages for mail from the base and it
seems that is still the case. Am I wrong? That is the deal
breaker for me. Would it be possible in the light of the fact
that some of the original ATT code and more recent versions of
mailx are now released (I am not sure under which license) to
add this feature to mail from the base.
Even though I was curious about the flexibility of mail in base, I do
wish to avoid feature creep as much as anyone else. For one thing, using
mail, you can attach files rather easily with the addition of the
metamail package from ports. It might be interesting to have MIME
support added into the base mail(1) but I think it isn't strictly
necessary since this can be accomplished with a simple dedicated program
doing it outside of mail(1).
Secondly, nail has native abilities to fetch the mail from imap
server using SSL as well as to connect to MTA via smtp and use
SSL again.
Haha, okay, now we're going a little over the top, imo. Not that I can't
see why we might find this useful, but I don't see any reason to bloat
mail for adding smtp support when sendmail is where that should be
handled. If one is going to use mail, is it that hard to ask them to
configure sendmail according to their wishes? I've always done that in
the past, and it has worked great.
Also, enough people do not use IMAP (such as myself) that it seems like
way too much feature creep to throw that in mail. Not to mention, it
does seem like it fits with the whole mail paradigm of doing things,
where we pipe out a lot of things to other programs for handling, and
then we deal with them locally on this end. If we added IMAP, we would
need a way for this to be done on the server to some extent, and that's
a little much.
It also has built in bayesian filter. My understanding that mail
from base doesn't have those capabilities.
I think we can handle spam filtering pretty well using spam assassin or
other controls used directly on sendmail, and that would work well if
you are using mail.
Now OpenSSH could circumvent above deficiencies of mail but my
question is there are tool in the base which can fetch (like
fetch mail from ports or similar perl module) messages from the
remote mailboxes on imap servers.
I do not know of any right now, but I think the better way of handling
this deficiency in base (if it can be considered a deficiency, since
this isn't something that servers would need, or that many users would
need), would be to add just that program to deal with fetching mail,
like fetchmail. However, I'd say that this isn't worth throwing in
base, because not so many people are going to find it useful.
Obviously one can use nail, mutt, alpine or gazzilion of other
"light weight" GUI mail clients to accomplish above but how to
do that only with tools from the base?
I do not think there is any reason to expect base to have all the
features that you need when you first get started, unless the features
that you need a sufficiently general that they are going to apply to a
wide variety of users. I can't see the above recommendations as
sufficiently general, even though I would in fact use something like
fetchmail and metamail. I really think that you are only talking about
adding metamail and fetchmail, which can be used together with sendmail,
spamassassin and mail to accomplish the above goals.
Just thoughts from someone who tends to stick with base.
Sincerely,
Aaron Hsu
