Re: [Nmh-workers] mailxi and attachements

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Aleksander,

> > I still use mail(1) for sending one-line emails or in pipes.
>
> More imporant (for me) is the possibility to send only file(s) as
> attachements.
>
> echo Enclosed | nail -a some.file address@hidden
>
> Similar functionality has mutt, switch -a. I can't do it via nmh.

whatnow(1) has the `attach' command and friends, but I agree, not as
easy.  It's perhaps something mhmail(1) should grow.

> Also composing message with attachment is not very easy. For me some
> form of -a switch in comp and repl is missing.

Yes, that would be good too.  Perhaps if one does a repl, sits in vi,
realises one wants to attach, exits and quits at whatnow, one could then
do `comp -use -attach foo' to be sitting back in vi with the old,
half-written, draft with an attachment tacked on.

> Use of mail client from different subsystem is not convenient, e.g. I
> can't use .mh_aliases.

Yeah, there's ali(1) but getting its output into a suitable form for
parameters to mail...

> > It's provided here by the heirloom-mailx package, derived from
> > Berkeley Mail 8.1 but brought up to date.  A concise list of
> > features, http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html
>
> It depends on package. Sometimes it is installed as nail and -a means
> attachchment, sometimes is installed as mailx and because of backward
> compatibility -a has different meaning. Then heilroom-mailx looses its
> most important feature.

Or sometimes, like Ubuntu 10.10 here, it's packaged as heirloom-mailx,
alternatives selects it,

    $ readlink -e /usr/bin/mail
    /usr/bin/heirloom-mailx

and it supports -a.

    $ man mail | sed '/^ *-a /p; 1,//d; /^$/Q'
           -a file
                  Attach the given file to the message.
    $ mail -a /etc/passwd ralph </dev/null
    No message, no subject; hope that's ok
    $

Cheers, Ralph.