UNIX Mail Systems

This chapter describes how mail forwarding is managed at Fermilab and discusses the UNIX mail handlers that are currently available and supported.

Notice of Upcoming Changes

Electronic mail is an area that is currently undergoing rapid growth and development, and it is important that we take advantage of new technologies that are becoming available. In particular, demand has been growing at Fermilab for a distributed mail system that allows users to access their mail from any machine in the network, including a variety of UNIX and non-UNIX platforms.

Of the available distributed mail technologies, IMAP (Interactive Mail Access Protocol) is the one that offers the most flexibility and greatest performance. It is a client-server mail protocol designed to permit manipulation of remote mailboxes as if they were local. A particular advantage it offers over its competitors is access to remote saved-message folders. We are currently investigating mail handlers that support IMAP, and will announce changes within the next few months regarding the mail handlers that will be available to Fermilab UNIX users.

As of the release date of this manual, we are providing and supporting the same mail handlers as previously documented, namely MH (including exmh and mh) and pine. We plan to continue providing them after IMAP is implemented. However, new users should think about whether they will eventually want to move to an IMAP-based mail handler before choosing MH or pine. They should also be aware of a couple of disadvantages associated with the MH products:

MH does not and never will support IMAP. Furthermore, the MH suite of products is no longer under development, at least partly because its underlying structure doesn't support any of the emerging distributed mail technologies. The future of MH is therefore uncertain. It is unlikely that we will continue to build more versions of MH for OS upgrades once the new mail recommendation is made. On the other hand, users who have already configured their mail in accordance with MH should be able to continue using exmh or mh as long as it works, albeit without the advantages of a distributed mail system.

New users may want to choose pine instead, since its native structure does support IMAP. The disadvantage to pine is, of course, its non-GUI, single-window user interface. If you plan to move over to an IMAP-based mail handler when it becomes available, and you choose pine in the interim, we recommend that you not configure pine to store messages in MH format.

Since pine is well documented elsewhere, this chapter provides only some start-up information in section 12.2.1 along with pointers to further information.

We cover the UNIX MH (Message Handling) products including both the standard line mode mail reader (referred to as mh), and a GUI version of MH called exmh. And we provide the information needed to get you up and running in mh or exmh as quickly and easily as possible, with a minimum of up-front configuration.

Appendix F contains information on how to customize exmh and mh, and how to take advantage of some of the less essential but very useful features. If you wish to do more in-depth customization of the MH products, we recommend the excellent reference book MH and xmh - Email for Users & Programmers by Jerry Peek, published by O'Reilly & Associates. An HTML version of this book can be accessed through the UNIX Resources Web page.

Appendix G provides a quick reference for the mh commands described in this chapter.

Appendix H contains instructions on moving your VMS mail folders to UNIX and converting them to the MH system format and organization.

You'll also find a brief discussion of Berkeley mail at the end of the chapter, only because it is a mail reader available on all UNIX machines.