Re: [Nmh-workers] Understanding nmh (aka. What\'s the goal)

[John Romine]

> >MH was written by and for people who have a deep understanding of how email
> >works, and who want to exploit the capabilities of email to the n-th degree.
> >These people also tend to be pretty hard core about the fundamentals of
> >software engineering, one of which is avoiding change for changes sake.
>
> I agree that was true maybe 20-30 years ago, but I am wondering:
> What does Marshall Rose or John Romine use as an email client today?
> Maybe they still use mh or nmh, but it sure wouldn't surprise me
> if they don't (if we've lost Jerry Peek, then the game really IS
> over).  Hell, I met Brent Welch, the author of exmh, a few months
> ago at a conference; he told me that while he still wants to support
> exmh, most of the time his email client is PC-based...

Well, since you asked, I am still using MH 6.8.4 on Solaris, often with
exmh.  I'm also running vintage MMDF as my MTA :-).

However, I'm also using Gmail, particularly because of its threading and
spam-rejection, and also because people mail me documents so often
(and Gmail provides a good in-browser preview).

Back when MH was under active development, we tried hard to maintain
backward-compatibility, particularly in minor releases.  However, we
would easily generalize an existing feature, or possibly add a new feature,
as long as the default behavior didn't change (i.e., we didn't break things).

This was important because incompatible changes affected our users'
productivity (and also created a huge support load), and that's not
a kind thing to do without a very good reason.  In those days,
many people would be logging into a single server, so they didn't
have a choice not to upgrade.  Installing an incompatible change
meant spending a lot of time fixing things for our users, or training
them on a new way of doing things.

John