Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!yale!husc6!encore!pierson From: pierson@encore.com (Dan L. Pierson) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Subject: Re: mh-e Message-ID: Date: 15 Aug 90 13:47:51 GMT References: <16940001@hpfcdj.HP.COM> Sender: news@Encore.COM Organization: Encore Computer Corporation Lines: 46 In-reply-to: jayavant@hpfcdj.HP.COM's message of 13 Aug 90 19:14:17 GMT In article <16940001@hpfcdj.HP.COM> jayavant@hpfcdj.HP.COM (Rajeev Jayavant) writes: / hpfcdj:comp.emacs / kpc00@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com (kpc) / 9:35 pm Aug 9, 1990 / >> Can anybody describe some of the relative advantages and disadvantages >> of mh-e wrt rmail? (mh-e is an mh front end. It appears that you >> must have mh to use mh-e. Will this be true in v19?) I have used both in the past. ... The two interfaces are pretty similar, though a couple of notable differences are mentioned below. rmail has the advantage of consolidating all of the messages in a "folder" into a single file. mh creates a separate directory for each folder with a separate file for each message. Unless rmail has been updated, it only had an option to generate a list of message headers which you couldn't really mainpulate. In mh-e, there is a 3 line window containing only headers which you can browse through. Keystrokes can be used in the header window to view, delete, answer,etc. the message corresponding to the selected header. I started out with rmail, installed mh so that I could use mh-e (mostly because of the lack of rmail support for summary (header) mode). Eventually the slowness of mh-e got to me. It is *much* slower than rmail for common operations such as viewing the next message in a large folder. The Kyle Jones wrote VM. One way to look at VM is as a mail mode that combines all the single file mail folder advantages of rmail with the summary mode support of mh-e. But there's more! :-) Unlike either rmail or mh-e, VM uses standard Unix format mail files so that you can access your mail either from the shell or from Emacs. It has active support, a bugs mailing list, and a lot of good features. There are a few additional things I'd like (better handling of compressed mail folders, appending to "open" folders, ...) but I'm glad I switched. -- dan In real life: Dan Pierson, Encore Computer Corporation, Research UUCP: {talcott,linus,necis,decvax}!encore!pierson Internet: pierson@encore.com