Re: [nmh-workers] Office 365, redux

[Ken Hornstein]

>> If anyone is required to use Office 365 for their $DAYJOB but still
>> wish to use your favorite MUA, here's a quick recipe that worked for
>> me and might work for you.
>
>Is there a man page for interfacing nmh to foreign odd-ball systems?
>Should there be?  Or somewhere else in the documentation other than the
>mailing-list archive?

Hm, good questions.

I mentioned in my 1.8 to-do list that "improved security documentation"
was on that.  That would be sort of coalescing the information in
inc(1), send(1), and other places and sort of explain how they all work
in something that is hopefully more clear, because it's probably not
obvious to the average user why you need -sasl to make authentication
in send(1) work, but you don't necessarily need it for inc(1), or what
exactly is the difference between -tls and -initialtls.  So, HOPEFULLY
that would be a starting point for people to get things like inc(1) and
send(1) working with oddball systems.

I think the man pages shipping with nmh should be as "timeless" as
possible, if that makes sense.  By that I mean they should document how
nmh works, with appropriate references to protocol standards (which
are not necesarily static but change relatively slowly), with as few
dependences on external software as possible.  So putting a pointer
in there to an external piece of software like DavMail feels wrong
to me ... who knows if DavMail is even going to be around in a few
years?  I sure HOPE it is, but it might be abandoned or supplanted by
something else.  And we've seen a number of users who use version of nmh
that are 5-10 years out of date so if we did put references to other
software packages those references stick around possibly way past their
usefulness.

But I get your point that this accumulated wisdom should probably be
collected somewhere, because having to search the mailing list for these
kind of things kind of sucks.  It also makes it hard for new users who
think that Office 365 precludes the use of nmh so they don't even try
it.  Also, having a place where these things are available would expose
people to other software; I didn't even know DavMail was a thing until
Andy Bradford mentioned it here a few weeks ago!

I am wondering if maybe we should put some recipes off of the nmh home
page?  And maybe make the man pages refer to that?  And Ralph, would you
want to write some of those web pages? :-)

--Ken