mutt c.f. MH: tell us more

mutt c.f. MH: tell us more

Because MH commands are run from your normal shell you can easily intermix working with your mail and working on other things. This is both true in terms of individual commands (eg, read mail message, do work to action it, reply to mail message), and also in terms of working with mail messages (eg, using shell commands, or a perl script, or whatever to identify messages to work with). Mutt's tag facility provides some of the later approach, but it's not as easy to do incremental refinement.

MH's draft facilities lets you work on multiple (outgoing) messages at once, either in parallel (which I do frequently) or by deferring them for later. You can pick all the deferred replies when you start up again (comp -use N). While Mutt allows you to postpone a single message I've not found a good way to deal with multiple postponed messages in Mutt.

You can work on messages in multiple folders at once, or easily interleaved (in Mutt you need to change folders). I do this quite frequently as well.

The shell-based nature of MH also allows you to define lots of aliases (and I have as has every MH user I've come across) for various common tasks, to speed up your work. In contrast Mutt's got a fairly fixed set of commands, and the defaults for some commands (eg, refiling messges) are just wrong.

MH gives you full template control over display of message headers, and pre-building messages (new, and replies) and per-MIME-type control over what programs are used to display messages. This can be used for quite a lot of flexibility.

I used elm for about the first 5 years of my Internet mail usage, and have used MH for most of the last 10 years, and once I got used to MH I found it much more flexible than elm ever had been. Mutt is better than elm in that respect (eg, more external hooks), but still not as flexible as MH.

It's just a shame that MH has essentially been unmaintained for the last 6-7 years, and hence it's support for "modern mail concepts" is limited.

Ewen