On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 8:18 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote: > > > What little I know about the MH type mail stores and associated utilities > are indeed quite powerful. ​Yep, their power and flaw all rolled together actually. Until I had Pachyderm on Tru64/Alpha with AltaVista under the covers (which was gmail's predecessor), I ran a flavor of MH from the time Bruce (Borden - MH's author) first released it on the 6th edition on the Rand USENIX tape. ​ I'm going to guess for about 25 years. Although for the last 8-10 years, I ran a post processor user interface called 'HM' (also from Rand) that was curses based that split the screen into two. > I think they operate under the premise that each message is it's own > file ​Correct - which is great, other than on small systems it chews up inodes and disk space which for v6 and v7 could be a problem. ​But it means everything was always ASCII and easy to grok and any tool from an editor to macro processor could be inserted. It also meant that unlike AT&T "mail", the division between the MUA and the MTA was first declared by the Rand and understood in Unix and used in the original UofI ArpaNet code (before Kurt's delivermail [sendmail's predecessor] which was part of UCB Mail, or the MIT mailer ArpaNet hacks that would come later). BTW: I may have the the original Rand MH release somewhere. We ran it at Tektronix on V6 on the 11/60 and then V7 on the TekLabs 11/70, as I brought it with me. We hacked the MTA portion to talk smtpd under Bruce's UNET code to our VMS/SMTPD at some point. > and that you work in something akin to a shell if not your actual OS shell. ​Exactly. ​Your shell or emacs if you so desired - whatever your native system interface was. HM took the idea a little further to make things more screen oriented and later versions of MH picked some of the HM stuff I'm told; but I had started to use Pachyderm - which was search based. > I think the MH commands are quite literally unix command that can be > called from the unix shell. I think this is in the spirit of simply > enhancing the shell to seem as if it has email abilities via the MH > commands. Use any traditional unix text processing utilities you want to > manipulate email. ​Absolutely. I do find myself, pulling things out of gmail, sometimes so I can do Unix tricks to inbound mail that gmail will not let me do. And when I want to do anything really automating on the send side, I have MH installed and it calls the local MTA. But I admit, the indexing that search gives you is incredibly powerful for day to day use and I could not go back. to MH.