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Welcome to Heirloom mailx! ========================== Mailx is derived from Berkeley Mail and is intended provide the functionality of the POSIX mailx command with additional support for MIME, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and S/MIME. It provides enhanced features for interactive use, such as caching and disconnected operation for IMAP, message threading, scoring, and filtering. It is also usable as a mail batch language, both for sending and receiving mail. Until March 2006, this project has been developed under the name "nail"; it is integrated into the Heirloom project now. The old name will persist at some places. If you were calling the program under the name "nail" and want to continue to do so, create a symbolic link to the mailx binary. New releases of mailx are announced on Freshmeat. If you want to get notified by email on each release, use their subscription service at <http://freshmeat.net/projects/mailx/>. The project homepage is currently at <http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html>. How to build ============ To compile and install mailx, look at the file 'INSTALL'. You can also build mailx RPMs using 'rpmbuild -tb mailx-<version>.tar.bz2'. You should always install the template for the system-wide configuration file. If this is not possible because you lack the necessary permissions, integrate its contents into your ~/.mailrc. This is because some of the built-in defaults are not appropriate anymore for the Unix platforms of today, but are still being kept for compatibility. Mailx has been built successfully in the following environments using the current configuration system: Linux Kernel 2.0 and above; libc4, libc5, glibc 2.2 and above, diet libc, uClibc; gcc, Intel C Sun Solaris 2.6 and above; Sun C, gcc Open UNIX 8.0.0 FreeBSD 4.9 and above HP HP-UX B.11.11, B.11.23; HP C/ANSI C, gcc HP Tru64 UNIX 4.0G, 5.1B; Developers' Toolkit C, gcc NetBSD 1.6, 2.0 IBM AIX 5.1; VisualAge C, gcc Cray UNICOS 9.0.2.2 Control Data EP/IX 2.2.1AA; /svr4/bin/cc OpenBSD 3.3 Apple Darwin 6.8 Apple Mac OS X 10.2 Server NEC UX/4800 Release11.5 Rev.A NEC SUPER-UX 10.2 DragonFlyBSD 1.3.7-DEVELOPMENT If your system does not appear in this list, just try it out. Whether it works or not, you should contact the development list and report the results. But note that I strongly discourage from porting mailx to Windows and environments that make Windows look Unix-like; I won't accept any patches or suggestions that go in this direction. There are two major reasons for this: First, any port makes maintaining harder; there are always more work-arounds in the source, and introducing new features involves the question whether they will work an all supported platforms. The more different a platform behaves from, let's say, the common Unix way, the more hacks have to be made, costing human time that could otherwise have been used to enhance the software for Unix platforms. Windows is just not worth this, and here we are at the second point: Porting software to Windows encourages people to use -- that is: to buy -- Windows. It supports a company that is known to threaten Open Source software like mailx. In short, porting mailx (or similar free software) to Windows has an ill effect on that software. Don't do it. Note that my statement doesn't legally restrict you if you want to port mailx to any platform. This would not be the way of free software either, especially since I might be wrong in the future; as an example, porting free software to mainframes of a certain company is considered a good thing today. I just wish to express my opinion as a free software developer, and to inform you that I don't maintain such a port. Mailbox formats =============== Mailx supports the mbox and maildir mailbox formats. The mbox format variant based on the 'Content-Length:' header field that is used on most SVr4 systems by default is not supported by mailx. As this format generally is a design flaw, you should fix your system by either using procmail for local mail delivery, which is a good idea anyway, or at least add the -E flag to the Mlocal line in /etc/sendmail.cf if using /usr/lib/mail.local. Although it is not bad, just obsolete, similar considerations apply to the MMDF format used on OpenServer systems; unless you switch to procmail (or contribute support for this format), mailx will not be able to read your mailbox there. Questions, suggestions, bug reports =================================== Please use the 'nail-devel' mailing list for questions, suggestions, or bug reports. This has at least three advantages over contacting me directly: 1. Other people can comment on the issue. They might have solved a similar problem, or might be willing to implement improvements. 2. Since all posts are archived, a problem needs to be commented once only, and the answers are readily available on the web then. 3. Unless you had an acceptable reason to contact me directly, I will refuse to give you technical answers by personal mail. Thus if you ignore this advice, you will just have to resend your message to the list. Also before you send something to the list, make sure that you did the following: 1. Check out that you are using a binary made from pristine sources of the latest release. This is particularly important if you received your mailx binaries from a third-party vendor. If you are unwilling to do this for whatever reason, use the support channels of your vendor and avoid abusing the Open Source development model. 2. Check that your issue is not already solved or commented in the existing documentation. This does not only involve reading this file; you also need to look at the manual page and the ChangeLog. After doing that, you need to search the mailing list archive for related topics. Remember that you are spending other people's spare time when you ask questions, and that you just waste it if your question was a superfluous one. 3. If you are reporting a bug, try to reproduce it and include detailed instructions for doing that in your report. If you cannot reproduce the bug, document carefully what you have done before the problem occurred. The more information you provide, the greater are the chances that the bug can be fixed quickly. Both the contact instructions and the list archive are available at <https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nail-devel>. You need to subscribe in order to post to the list. Enjoy! Gunnar Ritter Freiburg i. Br. Germany <gunnarr@acm.org> 01/03/07
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