Mail with nmh | Hacker News Reader

Mail with nmh

circuitousroot.com

16 pointsvyuh8 comments

Takes me back... I used mh and later nmh all the time back in the 90's. Combined with some good procmail recipes and spam assassin, I found it really effective. I pretty much moved away from it, though, when rich text and images became overwhelmingly prevalent.

I still would love there to be common usage of text-only emails just between friends (you can't categorize or quote-reply text messages), and talk/ytalk sessions for real-time communication.

I pretty much moved away from it, though, when rich text and images became overwhelmingly prevalent.

I use nmh with MH-E (the Emacs layer on top of nmh) and I see rich text and images in my emails all the time.

I use mutt currently, but I find the lack of rich-text and images a feature, not a bug.

This would an interesting use of DomTerm (htpp://www.domterm.org/), since it can display rich html text and images. Html attachments can be written directly to stdout (wrapped in the appropriate escape sequences). Of course you might want to filter remote img elements, for privacy. Images can be base64-encoded and also written to stdout.

Interesting, but pretty niche. Targets not just the general "I prefer tty based email", but the more niche "I prefer separate, pipable shell commands to interact with email".

If I'm stuck with tty, I would probably gravitate towards mutt. It can deal with MH type folders if that's already the system default.

GNU NMH: http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

I appreciate you linking to the project home page, but it’s not a GNU project.

Besides its home page being hosted on nongnu.org, its savannah page (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/nmh/) says

> This project is not part of the GNU Project.

and

> License: Modified BSD License

I used mh for a long time, but then I switched my mail folders over to Maildir for compatability with Dovecot. Also, I like how Maildir dodges a lot of file locking problems. So now I use a combination of mutt and iPhone Mail. I wish I could conveniently go back to the mh frontend while having Maildir folders.

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