On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 11:54:37AM +0100, Thorsten Haude wrote: > Moin, > > * Roman Neuhauser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [01-12-07 11:30]: > > I'm writing [somewhat slowly] an email howto which covers mutt > > (among other things). It's aimed at helping unix newbies grok the > > new terminology (MUA, MTA, MDA), and set their machines up for email > > "the hard way" (ie. avioding Mozilla etc., and going the > > "traditional" way instead - getmail, stunnel, maildrop, mutt, pgp, > > vim, abook, nullmailer, .mailcaap, etc.). Right now, it mostly > > covers stuff I, and one of my friends found underdocumented or hard > > to grasp, and where I write about mutt, I mostly cover the way _I_ > > use it (of course).
Mmm. Mutt ---- Some of the explanations in the manual are very unclear. For example yesterday I was trying to work out who does what to BCC mail. This can (and often does) involve an MUA, as well as an MTA. It is not at all obvious what Mutt does to it (no need to answer this btw!). Ok, that may be a bit esoteric. Explain scoring and how it can be used. Give some real-world examples of macros that do something useful, not artificial examples. I love Mutt but some of the things it does are counter-intuitive. I am sure I am not the first to be suprised by what the arrow keys do when you are in the pager with part of the index displayed on the screen (jumps to the next index entry rather than goes down the text being paged). And lots and lots of other things. Maybe later when I am less tired I may send some more :) In general. Tell them there are other (safer,securer,simpler) MTA's than sendmail. Warn them that procmail is a nightmare invented by someone with a grudge against the human race, and eats cpu cycles like they are going out of fashion. That mutt is an MUA and it's inbuilt pop capabilities are strictly last-resort. If you can clear up for beginners where an MTA ends and an MDA begins that would help. Since MTA's are also "MDA's" (in the literal sense of the words), it is better to see MDA's as a delivery processing agent (or whatever). Just my brain dump :) -- Regards Cliff
