Mail Readers

Unix mail readers

pine -- Pine is a menu driven mail reader, with lots of capabilities and features. It contains its own simplified editor. Pine's online help is quite good. This is probably the all around best choice, unless you already have a preference. Note pine is also equipped to display non-text MIME mail files. (See below)
mail -- mail is the standard unix mail system. Like unix, its quirky and hard to learn, but it's always there. It is especially good for remote logins and other situations where your terminal capability might be restricted. More information is available in the man page or the internal help screen ("?" from the command prompt within mail).
elm -- Elm is basically a menu driven version of the standard mail program. By default, it assumes you will edit your messages with vi. The elm internal help system is minimal, and the man page is not much better.

Specialty mail readers

rmail -- rmail is the emacs mail reader. Like emacs, it is tremendously powerful, but it does require a knowledge of emacs. Like all GNU products, it is well documented via info from the command line, or ctrl-H i within emacs.
Mail.app -- The NeXT mail reader is intuitive and easy to use, with plenty of capability. Its main drawback is that it converts messages into binary form. Thus if you need to access old messages from several platforms, this is probably not for you. However, it will handle non-text MIME attachments.
MedisMail -- The SGI mail reader (on newer machines) is a lot like the NeXT mail reader. It works great, but it probably has some compatibility problems. It is also designed to handle non-text MIME attachments.
zmail -- zmail is the SGI command line version of MedisMail. It is worth mentioning on account of the MIME attachment support.

MIME Utilities

MIME stands for Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions. It is a proposed collection of file format standards for sending various kinds of non-text documents. The best known non text MIME type is the text/HTML format of web documents.

The Center has installed a publicly available MIME package from Bellcore. This package contains a suite of utilities for encoding and mailing a variety of file types, as well as system level utilities for teaching mail reader like PINE to interpret and properly display non-text mail on the fly. Some of the most useful programs are listed below. For more details, consult the man page for metamail and follow the references.

pine -- pine is a MIME mail program that is set up to send and receive a variety of non-text MIME formats. One sends non-text files via mail "attachments". One simply trusts pine is smart enough to do the right thing when receiving non-text messages. For more info, consult the online help from within pine.
mailto -- this Bellcore's mail sending program for non-text MIME mail. This allows a user more flexibility to compose and send non-text messages than pine, but it is more involved. mailto actually invokes other composing utility programs that the enterprising user can also use directly. Refer to the man page and follow the references.
metamail -- this is Bellcore's counterpart mail reading program. Again, it is more involved than simply trusting pine, but it is correspondingly more powerful. Like mailto, it also invokes utility display programs that are directly available to the user. See the man page.
mmencode -- mmencode is a more robust reworking of the old unix utilities uuencode/uudecode.
splitmail -- This utility allows a user to split large files into smaller files suitable for mailing.

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Created: Fri Sep 8 11:39:00 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996