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Old 8th November 2008
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Oko Oko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kosovo, Serbia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
Could you expound on why you think mailx is better than any other MUA - such as mutt (which I'm starting to use).
Well the part of your answer is already given in your question. Mutt is only MUA. Originally could not even fetch mail. So you needed fetch mail package to do that part of job. In order to send the mail you had to configure sandmail as Mutt has no support for SMTP. That seems like overkill to me. SMTP support has been added in the past two years but is not stable. For a long time the developers of Mutt insisted that mutt is only MUA and they will not add SMTP support.

On another hand Nail is Mail on steroid with full MIME support. High quality simple code that does the ob right. It confers to Unix philosophy.
It means, it does only what it is support to do. If you need the editor to edit the mail you can call vi from nail. If you need to spell check you call ispell from within the vi. Allows you to send multiple attachments, receive them. You can pipe the things like HTML messages to lynx. In another words it is a very, very good Unix program that doesn't duplicate other functions. It is extremely easy to configure by editing .nailrc. It has imap and smtp support included. It supports TLS both on IMAP and SMTP side. You can do multiple accounts. It includes Bayesian junk mail filter. It is trivial to use any spam filter with it. Easily to manage many different boxes. Can display massages as threads. It is easy to embed into your web-applications. I could just go on and on. The tarball is also far smaller than Mutt.

Oh, did I say the classical Berkley Mail interface that I dig very much

That is being said I used Mutt mostly in order to help other people so I am
really strongly bias towards Nail. I have used for a long time Pine on various proprietary Unix-es so I could talk more about it.


Cheers,
OKO
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