Re: [Nmh-workers] Understanding nmh (aka. What's the goal)

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On 10-12-01 8:21 PM, Ken Hornstein wrote:
> I agree that was true maybe 20-30 years ago, but I am wondering:
> What does Marshall Rose or John Romine use as an email client today?
> Maybe they still use mh or nmh, but it sure wouldn't surprise me
> if they don't (if we've lost Jerry Peek, then the game really IS
> over).  Hell, I met Brent Welch, the author of exmh, a few months
> ago at a conference; he told me that while he still wants to support
> exmh, most of the time his email client is PC-based.  And if your
> email provider goes to an IMAP solution, you'll get to a point where
> nmh simply won't work for you anymore unless you're really hardcore
> and willing to cook up a bunch of crazy solutions ... and those
> people are becoming rarer and rarer.

I would be surprised (stunned, really) if anyone was still using MH 
*exclusively* as their MUA.  I haven't done so for years.  Today I have 
a regular rotation of about six MUAs I use on a near-daily basis, and I 
usually have three of them running concurrently.  There's no one MUA in 
existence that can (or could) handle all the varying types of media that 
get thrown around now.  And even of the ones that do handle, say, ical 
objects, which of the three I choose to use for a particular message 
depends on its context (work v. personal v. hobby stuff).  In that 
spectrum, MH is just one of the tools I use to plow through the deluge 
of mail I receive every day.  I use it for the tasks it's good at, and I 
don't pretend it's the solution for dealing with highly complex 
interactive media messages, for which there are more suitable tools.

Now I agree completely that MH really needs to do a better job with 
MIME.  But the solution is not to turn it into a python-based rewrite of 
Evolution.

--lyndon