Re: [Nmh-workers] Re: should nmh be an MTA or an MUA?

[Ken Hornstein]

>If popularity is the goal, then my answer to this is a resolute NO.

I guess I see a wide range of possibilities between "popular" and "dead".

>MH has filled a niche outside the mass market of MUAs since its inception. 
>What it does, it does well.
>
>What it doesn't, it doesn't well. That's not a bad thing. In fact, I don't 
>see why that's even an issue.

Here's my problem with that.

The world isn't standing still.  Let's put aside ideas like IMAP
support ...  right now nmh is behind the curve on basic functionality.
Huge example - replying to a MIME message pretty much sucks.  In
fact, even the basic MIME support isn't that wonderful.  Example:
I received a message today that was a single text/plain part, but
encoded in base64 (I am guessing because the character set is utf-8).
Thankfully exmh dealt with it properly, but replying to that message
sucks.  Dealing with this message with "show" sucks.  You might
argue that sending a base64-encoded text/plain is unreasonable ...
but it is a valid message according to the MIME standard, and nmh
handles it poorly.  So now we're in a situation where the way people
use email is moving forward, and nmh is becoming less and less able
to deal with modern messages.  That means at some point, nmh will
simply be useless to deal with the vast majority of messages that are
out there.  If your interest is to only exchange messages with other
nmh users, then I guess you won't care ... but I would suggest that
if nmh doesn't evolve, at some point there won't be any other nmh
users.

--Ken