eli-mailx

Personal fork of mailx.

Several features that are important to me:

• mailx has good header search features that I find easy to use, this fork keeps those and adds some others.

  • Message sizes are highlighted in lines and bytes in index summary and can be searched using the same notation:
    • f > 500M find mail over 500 megabytes
    • f = 10c find mail with 1000 (ten hundreds) of lines (using the same rounding rules the display uses)
  • Found a line number with grep -n? Use p #8331 to print the message containing line 8331.
  • Instead of needing to set searchheaders, a different search prefix can be used (have searchheaders enabled makes regular searches slower):
    • f '%Header:term of interest to find a "Header: with "term of interest" in it.
  • A history of exactly one search for the use-case of searching with the from command non-destructively and then applying a command, e.g., delete to those same matched messages. Use ! as a message list for that history or ~ as a message list to invert that prior selection.
  • A summary command that prints only pre-selected headers as a modernization of the old top command. The interest list can customize the header selection.

• Rnmail command, uses a shell script (derived from the one included with rn/trn) to compose repiles to mail

  • Because the 1980s native mail composer in mailx is bad.
  • Rnmail is a friendly front-end to sendmail -oi
    • Arbitrary headers can be set or edited.
    • So the MIME savvy user can compose MIME email.
    • Mail "From" any special address is easy to send.
  • Example scripts in rnmail.d/

• Header highlighting, selected by the same interface as header hiding.

  • Highlighting pre- and post-fixes an arbitrary string, which can be ordinary or an escape sequence.
    • Backticks now supported in settings for using tput to set escape sequences.

• Variables are used in more places, such as to hold the destination of mailboxes to Save files to, or read mail -From. The echo command has been made useful to examine variables.

• Help has been rewritten to support multiple help files on different topics. For built-in commands it also explains parameters used based on the flags used internally.

• The touch command fixed to mark messages as read without reading them.

  • The unread command has always existed to mark as unread.

• The one-line index of messages in a mailbox has been tweaked to my tastes:

  • Terse date, for a longer subject line excerpt.
  • "Human" readable style (ls -H) message size descriptions.
  • Some terminal width sensitivity, for reading on my narrow phone screen or extra-wide xterms.

• The mailx I started with still had 1980s ideas of message sizes. No longer does this use 16 bit short for things like number of lines.

Some things to know about my mail set-up:

• I like the big mbox full of many messages model, not the directory full of single message files model. But I sort and use multiple mboxes.

• I prefer to deal with MIME mail with procmail rules during delivery, so the stuff that makes it to my inbox has path names to extracted files added as a MIME prefix. See procmail.d/ for example recipes.

• My version of Rnmail has rules for determining the "From" address I will use and parses out the address from the headers to use as envelope from address when invoking sendmail. While my exact version is not in this distribution for privacy reasons, an example version is in rnmail.d/

  • I use separate email addresses for basically all non-personal email.
  • This facilitates sorting and makes address shaing obvious.
  • My Github address, my Wikipedia address, my Amazon address, etc, are all different and I want to use them sometimes when sending mail.
    • This is particularly important for mailing lists.