What are MH and NMH, and where can I get more information about them?

Note: Mail service is not available on any of the UITS central Unix systems at Indiana University.

Mail Handler (MH) and New Mail Handler (NMH) are highly extensible and customizable Unix mail packages. Most mailers do not allow you to perform mail operations outside of the mail environment. The advantage of MH and NMH is that each command is a separate program, called independently from the command line. For example, to list the contents of the current mail folder, enter:

After the command executes, the Unix shell prompt is immediately available. Thus, pipes, redirection, history, and aliases work with MH and NMH commands, as they do with any other Unix command. For example, if there are many messages in the current mail folder, it is possible to pipe the output of scan into a pager such as less:

Other basic MH and NMH commands include:

Each MH or NMH folder is a Unix directory, and each message is a separate file within that directory. This provides a familiar interface with the Unix file system. Almost all features of MH and NMH are thoroughly customizable, including extensive mail filtering, presentation of headers, and command output. To specify your preferred settings, such as the format in which messages are displayed, your preferred editor, and many other options, create a file in your home directory named .mh_profile .

MH was developed by the University of California, Irvine. However, it is no longer supported or updated. To address this problem, a separate group of programmers, principally Richard Coleman at the Georgia Institute of Technology, revised the MH code to produce NMH. NMH is very similar to MH and offers improved documentation, performance, and portability. Those who are familiar with MH should have little difficulty switching to the newer program.

For more information, see the NMH web page. For a forum to discuss both MH and NMH, see the newsgroup comp.mail.mh.

To view the MH online manual page, at the Unix prompt, enter:

For NMH, enter:

Each MH and NMH command also has its own man page.

At Indiana University, to get support for personal or departmental Linux or Unix systems, see At IU, how do I get support for Linux or Unix?

Also see:

• At IU, what email systems are available?