Hi Pieter,

Pieter Verberne wrote on Mon, Dec 24, 2007 at 05:09:20PM +0100:
quoted text
> After some years of experience with Mutt I want to try Mail
> (/usr/bin/mail):-) I'm very curious about how many people are
> using Mail nowadays (on this list).

I'm using it mainly for two purposes:
 1) Sending test messages i don't want to keep copies of,
    it those cases where mail(1) is more convenient than telnet(1).
 2) Sending administrative messages to users while logged into
    server consoles.
 3) And rather rarely when i feel just too lazy to start
    a full-blown mutt process.

quoted text
> And what about "Heirloom mailx"?

Hm, i never cared about the features and differences of mail, Mail,
mailx and whatever.  They should just work for elementary purposes
and not change.  For the cases where i need advanced editing and
mailbox management features, emacs, elm, pine and mutt - in that
historical order - have always been around.

quoted text
> In my eyes, Mail has a few notable things. When I want to send mail, I
> type "mail mail@adres.com" Enter the subject and than I get a kind of
> very minimalistic text editor with tilde-escape-functions.

Are you sure you should call that an "editor"?
Methinks mail is just reading standard input line by line.

See the collect() function in /usr/src/usr.bin/mail/collect.c.
It's using readline(3) - what a bloat ;) - perhaps that gave
you the impression of talking to an editor.

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> This is a bit strange to me as 'UNIX's philosophy' is to make small
> applications that do just one thing, and do it well.

Yeah, use STDIN and STDOUT and let users establish pipes as required.
That's it, you are quite right.

quoted text
> When I'm composing a mailmessage in Mutt, I use a editor for it.
> Why is Mail designed to not use a editor (vi/emacs) by default?
> There must be a reason.

Mail _is_ designed to use ex(1) by default:

 $ mail schwarze@usta.de 
Subject: test
~e
/tmp/mail.RevPyHb17828: unmodified: line 1
:a
test text
^CInterrupted
:wq
/tmp/mail.RevPyHb17828: 1 lines, 10 characters
(continue)
^DEOT
 $

If you just start mail(1), you get no editor whatsoever.
You type in the text of you mail as if you were using telnet(1),
except, of course, that you may profit from readline(3).
If you want an editor, use ~e.  You get ex(1), unless EDITOR is set.
See mail(1) for more details.

[...]
quoted text
> in a well known threat on this list

Is that how rumours come into being?   =;c)