Mailers

["David R. Kohel" <kohel@singa.math.nus.sg>]

This is not really Debian specific, but is relevant to handling 
the volume of mail from this mailing list.

I've been using elm for years.  But as far as I can tell, it 
does not handle multiple active folders.  Before investing in 
converting all of my mail archives to a new system, I'd like 
to know what I'm getting into.

I would like to be able to define and presort different mail 
folders and (why not?) mail subfolders.  Under elm, I just 
started running my mail through filter, as suggested in the 
official Elm Documentation (filter seems to be part of sendmail 
only -- not available for smail?), through which I can save the 
debian list to a folder, but without information on which I 
have read, etc.  Moreover, it doesn't have a directory of my 
folders.  Does anyone have any suggestions or scripts for 
preprocessing mail in a more intelligent fashion? 

I would also like to predefine folders (both personal aliases 
and group aliases independent of my mailing aliases) to which 
the mail handler should save read messages.  This doesn't seem 
to be a feature in elm.  A real mail processor should support 
some sort of database of people, groups, and folders, intelligent 
enough to recognize a sender, access her or his PGP key, etc., 
despite multiple possible e-mail addresses.

Pine probably handles folders well, but I've always thought of 
the user interface as ugly.  What are the limitations of pine? 
Is is fully configurable and programable, or does it also have 
a ceiling?  

Xmh and exmh are out -- I read mail from all over and need a 
text-based system.  Or is there a good text-based user interface 
to mh which would be programmable and have a compatible system of 
directories and mail handling tools?  Before getting too deeply 
into mh and (e)xmh, and chopping up my current mail folders, I 
would need to know that I can find all the necessary tools there. 

Emacs?  Are the mail handling tools of emacs worth looking into? 

I find it hard to believe that the perfect, fully configurable 
mail handler is not already out there.  

David


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