On 24-May-05 Chris Green wrote:
Are there any GUI mail clients that read Linux/Unix mailbox file mail delivery? I use mutt for most of my mail reading but now that I can do all my mail reading on my home machine it would occasionally be useful to read my mail with a GUI mail reader (e.g. for the very occasional HTML mail that says something useful with the HTML, and/or to look at attached pictures).
All the GUI clients I have tried in days gone by have assumed mail comes from a POP3 server and/or munge the local mail spool with specialised indexes etc. that break it for other (better behaved) clients.
It doesn't even have to be a Linux program as my Win2k machine has access to the mail on the Linux box.
Hi Chris,
Not entirely sure that I understand your question exactly, but I think the email client I use (XFMail) might do what you're looking for.
It can deal with a variety of mbox formats:
Unix A file with several messages; each message begins with MBOX: "From <followed by sender's address and valid date>", separated from the next message by a blank line. [local access]
MH: Each message is a separate file (named with a number) in some folder (= directory) [local access]. This is XFMail's standard local storage format.
IMAP: You probably know more about this than I do since I don't use it! [remote access]
Mail retrieval is by one of
Spool: Local spool file (Unix MBOX) POP: Remote POP server IMAP: Remote IMAP server
You can set up as many accounts of these types as you like.
Also, you can copy/move mails from one mbox to another with a different format. This can have unexpected uses -- for instance, you can export from MS Outlook to Unix MBOX, and thereby transfer Windows mail to Linux and vice versa.
XFMail (based on XForms libs) does mail display, editing, and composing, all in new windows, so you can have several windows open for reading at a time while editing or conmposing in another. You can edit and compose several messages at the same time (each in its own window).
You can configure how it handles MIME types, and add new ones. If you get an HTML mail, this will appear as an HTML attachment which you can then open (again in a separate window) in whatever browser you like. It has lots of other features too! You can control what it does by point&click or by "shortcut" key strokes.
The version I use is now ancient (1998, though I was using it also in earlier versions), and there have been one or two later versions. It then lapsed (around 1999/2000), and was to be re-incarnated as Archimedes by Chris Freeze and others (involving moving from XFroms to Gtk). This project still seems to be taking its time for completion.
However, it seems that fairly recent versions of XFMail are available at Chris Freeze's site on
http://www.cfreeze.com/xfmail/
where there are binaries for (e.g.) up to Red Hat 9, and source code, the "current" directory being dated 2005.
Some info about Archimedes can be found at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/archimedes/
but I don't know when anything was last done with it.
You may find that standard distributions of Linux (e.g. red Hat, SuSE, Debian) come with XFMail, or have binaries available for download.
Hoping this helps, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 24-May-05 Time: 16:36:26 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------