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Mail.app utilities 2.0
======================
This is the tenth release of the Mail.app utilities. For a list of
changes see the end of this file.
The archive contains some command line tools useful in conjunction
with Mail.app. `Nextmail' has a command line interface similar to UCB
mail but instead of sending the letter it puts it in a Mail.app
compose window. `Appnmail' appends messages to the end of Mail.app
mailboxes while taking care to properly handle locks, NeXT mail and
the table of contents. `Compactmail' compacts Mail.app mailboxes just
like the Compact menu item does. (In addition, there is also a small
utility called `listmail' which lists Mail.app table_of_contents. This
is a minor program created mainly for my own debugging, but as it may
come in handy for others it is part of this package as well.)
There are also three other files in this package. `Sendmail-addheadsig'
will automatically add headers, ASCII signatures or even RTF or RTFD
signatures to your outgoing Mail.app letters. After installation,
change the Mail.app "Mailer" expert preference to point to the
location of this script (/usr/local/lib/sendmail-addheadsig by
default) and all the lines in your ~/.add-header files will be added
to the header, the ASCII text of ~/.signature will be added at the end
of outgoing non-NeXTmail messages and the contents of
~/.signature.rtfd (and if that doesn't exist, ~/.signature.rtf) will
be added to the end of outgoing NeXTmail messages. This allows you
e.g. to automatically add your own TIFF picture or digitized real
signature to all NeXTmail you send.
[maintainer's note: for Mail.app 3.3 and later, roughly equivalent
functionality is available in the EnhanceMail bundle, of the same
author.]
`Sendmail-remote' is installed just like sendmail-addheadsig is. It
will cause Mail.app to run sendmail on another machine. This may not
be widely useful but in some situations it is invaluable.
There is also an emacs-lisp program called `gnus-mailapp.el'. It will
integrate Mail.app with GNUS to the same degree Mail.app is integrated
with NewsGrazer. For instructions on how to enable its features, read
the comments at the beginning of gnus-mailapp.el. `MyMail.ts' is a set
of TickleServices (for use with Scott Hess TickleServices.app) which
make use of the mailapp utilities.
[maintainer's note: this seems to predate, and offer less functionality,
than the Mail.ts shipped with TickleServices 1.11.]
All have only been tested under NeXTStep 3.[0123] and OPENSTEP/Mach 4.[012],
but for all but `nextmail' no reason to assume that they won't also work
under earlier versions of the operating system. For more detail see the
included man pages.
Personally I use `appnmail' in conjunction with `procmail' which makes a
very powerful combination for handling incoming mail. `Nextmail'
(together with a number of elisp functions also included in this
archive) causes all mail which I would send from within emacs (such as
replies to articles read in GNUS) to be redirected through Mail.app,
though many other uses are imaginable as well. `Compactmail' was
created to help all the people screaming about the lack of an
autocompact feature in Mail.app.
Installation should be no problem: just install mailapp-utilities.pkg
using Installer.app.
The utilities currently cannot be compiled with OS/4.x -- you must
rebuild it on a NS/3.x system.
If you find any bugs or have any problems feel free to email me.
Current maintainer (as of 1.6):
Tom Hageman <tom@basil.icce.rug.nl> 1997/08/07
--> Please send your comments, bugreports etc. to:
<mailapp-utilities@basil.icce.rug.nl>
Original author:
Carl Edman <cedman@lynx.ps.uci.edu>
CHANGES
=======
1.8 to 2.0:
* appnmail now knows how to incorporate messages into a mailbox while it
is open in Mail.app -- no need to close and re-open the mailbox in order
to let appnmail do its job anymore! (This may not work with earlier
versions of Mail.app; I think it should work with all 3.x versions, but
it is tested only with 3.3 and 4.[012])
* appnmail has been made more robust: it now saves its message to disk
as soon as possible, to a temporary mbox if need be, to minimize the
chance of losing messages in a system crash.
* Installables are now distributed in an Installer package.
1.7 to 1.8:
* Fixed mbox-locking race condition that caused appnmail to fail to deliver
messages in rare circumstances (reported by Tim Luoma <luomat@peak.org>).
* Print informational message when starting to wait for mbox lock.
* Compactmail bugfix: Mail.app marks some deleted messages with `D',
which wasn't understood by compactmail.
* Add `-NXHost host' option to nextmail. This contacts Mail.app on the
specified host.
* mailtoc routines now use stdio for more efficient table_of_contents
reading. (Actually this is to benefit EnhanceMail; it shares this code
with mailapp-utilities.)
1.6 to 1.7:
* _Serious_ appnmail bug fixed: it used to write a corrupt table of
contents upon mailbox creation.
* Appnmail tries very hard to deliver its message anyway, even if the
mailbox's table of contents is corrupt or otherwise cannot be updated.
1.5 to 1.6:
* Make appnmail's NeXTmail handling work again with OPENSTEP 4.x.
(appnmail-1.5 unconditionally invoked "/NextApps/Mail.app/safetar",
which is missing in Mail.app 4.0.)
As a result of this fix, appnmail now obeys Mail's hidden "TarCommand"
and "UncompressCommand" defaults. If "TarCommand" is not set,
"/NextApps/Mail.app/safetar" and "/usr/bin/gnutar" are tried, in that
order. If "UncompressCommand" is not set, "/usr/bin/gunzip" and
"/usr/ucb/uncompress" are tried, in that order.
* Minimize the risk of corrupting mailboxes in appnmail by moving the
actual "append-to-mbox" beyond possible failure points.
* MIME 8-bit quoted header translation by appnmail. For now, supported
character sets are: iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-2.
* Add -H (help) and -V (version) options to all utilities.
* Bugfix in stale-lock detection: it was possible to steal a lock that
is in use by a process owned by another user, if we have write access to
the mailbox.
* Make table-of-contents reading code more robust against corrupted TOCs.
* Table-of-contents reading code now resides in its own source files, to
facilitate its reuse by other utilities.
1.4 to 1.5:
* Added workaround for Mail.app 3.3 NeXTmail bug
* Added mbox2bsd
* Correct handling of message priorities
* Elimination of stale locks left by other applications
* Appnmail can mark messages as flagged as well as read/unread/deleted
* All mailapp utilities are more aggressive about detecting stale locks
1.3 to 1.4:
* Appnmail now accepts multiple mail messages with the -m option (no, it doesn't !)
* added -t option to listmail on suggestion by
Hadar Pedhazur <ubs!hadar@uunet.uu.net>.
1.2 to 1.3:
* Extremely evil byte order bug on little endian machines was fixed. The
utilities now do work under NS/FIP.
* Support for NS 3.3.
* MyMail.ts added.
* Undocumented searchmail added.
* The mailapp utilities work with hierarchical mailboxes.
* Mime messages are classified correctly.
* The mailapp utilities interpret '~' in path names.
1.1 to 1.2:
* compactmail may work under NS/FIP now.
* appnmail has been speeded up about 100x. On large messages this really
matters.
* A minor bug in appnmail was fixed which when the incoming message
had a malformed Date header could cause Mail.app to believe that the
mailbox directory was corrupted and recreate the table_of_contents
file. This error could not cause the loss of mail messages.
* Listmail has a man page now.
* The Mail.app utilities are compiled fat.
* Compactmail tries not to touch a mailbox at all if there are no
deleted messages in it.
* First public release of GNUS/Mail.app interface.
* The Mail.app utilities are now NS/FIP compatible thanks to Todd Swan
<tms@cfc.com>.
* The Mail.app utilities now include sendmail-addheadsig.
* Compactmail adds the -d, -s, -f and -u options.
1.0 to 1.1:
* Compactmail and Listmail were added.
1.0:
* First public release
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.