Dave Holland's MUA page

A MUA is a Mail User Agent, i.e. the piece of software that you interact with to read and send email. I still haven't found a MUA I'm completely happy with. At the moment I use Mutt.

Mutt is a "mongrel" of an email program, originally written by Michael Elkins. It's based loosely on elm with occasional features from mh, Pine, etc showing through. I use it because:

it can thread mailing lists
it has colour support
it has good MIME support (including PGP/MIME signatures)
easy to open embedded URLs in email
the key bindings are customisable
it's smaller than Pine (typically 280Kb vs. 1.5Mb!)

Mutt has other useful features and is under current development. See The Mutt FAQ for more information. For more information on Pine, see the University of Washington Pine pages.

My Pine Patches

I have made available a patch for Pine v3.96 which implements the following changes:

Much shorter message-id's
Never offer to delete old mail at the monthly "pruning"
Some use of colour (status bar and messages) under xterm and Linux console
No extra newline between attribution and quoted text in reply
Attachments of type 'text/plain' are shown in the message viewer rather than having to be explicitly chosen
The bug with multiple To: or Cc: lines has been fixed

This patch is released under the terms of the GNU GPL version 2.

Dave Holland <dave@biff.org.uk>

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