Eudora Replacement

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| Doug Sweetser wrote:
| > Hello:
| >
| > Another important factor in the long term success of Unix is the
| > ineroperability of tools.  Although I use mh primarily, I can also use
| > exmh, sylpheed, and squirrelmail (I regularly use the last two).  The
| > underlying data structure is the same, individual files.
| >
| > As I only barely understand it, the mbox format was developed by
| > sys admins who didn't want so many small files around for each
| > user.  Do evolution, thunderbird, and kmail give you a choice about
| > how mail gets stored: individual files, mbox, or uniq format?  I know
| > that sylpheed will allow either individual files or mbox, which is the
| > best answer.
|
| If you store your mail locally (i.e., grab it from a POP server),
| Mozilla, Thunderbird, and KMail store it in mbox format. If you keep
| your mail on an IMAP server, the format choice depends on the IMAP
| server you use.

Yeah; that's what I've found.  I've tried to find some  way  to  make
these  put  messages  into separate files, but the topic doesn't even
seem to be mentioned anywhere in their docs or config windows.

This is mostly why I use this machine for my main email.   I  have  a
login  account  here,  and I can use mh to read my mail.  Then when I
want to feed a message to some program, as I often do, I can ust type
a  file  name  like Mail/inbox/123 rather than digging it out of some
silly mbox file.  And I can use grep to find things.

Most mail readers  are  written  for  non-geeks,  of  course,  so  it
probably  doesn't occur to their authors that someone might ever want
to do something other than read a message and reply to it. What's odd
about  this is that the mail readers' authors must be programmers, so
they certainly know how useful it is to have  random  programs  munge
their email.