Re: [Nmh-workers] Should I learn nmh or GNU mailutils?

[heymanj]

On 13 February 2014 at 19:49, address@hidden:

> Thanks for the clarifications.
> What about ease of use, especially from a newbie perspective?

I'm a 25yr user of [n]mh, also having contributed a minor code change 
many years ago. I'll talk about my experiences with nmh, I have never
had a desire to explore mailutils.

Ease of use is in the eye of the beholder.  What you have to understand
is that nmh provides a set of unique commands that have a single use,
rather than a monolithic email program that does everything.  Additionally
the tools can be used via a GUI (many exist, my current preference is
sylpheed) or right in a putty/ssh/terminal session.

I probably don't use 50% of the function available, but I've been able
to archive my email each time I've moved systems and been able to unarchive
it an read it as though it was just sent.  I have messages that are 20+
yrs old that I've saved, and use the same tools to manipulate them.

> Also, which scripting language would you suggest? Is there already a 
> repository for nhm scripts?

I've never had a reason to script anything - I might be the exception.
The only thing I've done is changed GUIs that I've used over the years.
I started with xmh (X Windows based client), moved to exmh (TCL based
client), to finally settling on Sylpheed.  I use fetchmail to grab my
email from my ISP and then do all the processing on my local machine.
Over the years that machine has run AIX, SCO OpenServer, BSD, and now
Linux.

I don't know if my experiences are normal, but they're how I make
use of nmh.  Hope this information helps in your decision.

jerry
     // Jerry Heyman               | We are all born ignorant, but
    //  Amigan Forever :-)         | one must work hard to remain stupid
\\ //   heymanj at acm dot org     | -- Benjamin Franklin
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