After some years of experience with Mutt I want to try Mail (/usr/bin/mail):-) I'm very curious about how many people are using Mail nowadays (on this list). And what about "Heirloom mailx"?
In my eyes, Mail has a few notable things. When I want to send mail, I type "mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]" Enter the subject and than I get a kind of very minimalistic text editor with tilde-escape-functions. This is a bit strange to me as 'UNIX's philosophy' is to make small applications that do just one thing, and do it well. When I'm composing a mailmessage in Mutt, I use a editor for it. Why is Mail designed to not use a editor (vi/emacs) by default? There must be a reason. When I reply a message with mail, I can put the original message in my mail to quote it. Mail is 'quoting' the original message with a Tab before all the lines. (Just how RMS seems to quote in a well known threat on this list) I almost never see this kind of quoting. Most people quote by putting '>' before each line. Since the netiquette says you should break each line after 70/72 characters, this tab before each line looks prety strange to me. Especially because Mail was probably used on low-resolution monitors in the past wich could 'blur' these messages. (However, I think I can configure Mail to put a > before each line) Mail's default editor also doesn't break lines automaticly after 72 characters. So for replying I should type ~m [enter] (to put the original message in the reply) and ~| fmt [enter] (to make my own lines break after 72 characters) or ~v [enter] (to compose my mail in vi) Doing this for every mail I reply is very unpractical. I want to use Mail on my ISP's shell account. (FreeBSD:-) ) But they use maildir. They do have a kind of maildir to mbox converter. It is a perl script: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pjhv/maildir2mbox . I think it is necessary to use maildir2mbox, if I want to use Mail. But I can't figure out how maildir2mbox works. Anyone experience with it? Someting else: When I use Vi, I almost always set wraplength to 72. When I typed a few lines and want to correct something in a previous line, the lines do not always wrap at 72 characters anymore. For example: I remove the word "almost". Now the line is just 64 characters long so the paragraph from the word "lines" could just shove up. Does VI has a function for this or can do it automaticly? Or are the VI fans using FMT(1) for this? (I prefer VI over VIM) Pfff, I can't type English anymore right now. It is taking to much brainpower:-) So, please clear some things up for me:-) Pieter Verberne
