EXMH TOUR(1) INTRO TO EXMH EXMH TOUR(1)NAMEexmh - An introduction to the exmh mail user interface.
INTRODUCTION
This man page provides a quick tour through some of the
basic features of exmh version 2.0, which provides a
graphical user interface to the MH mail system.
After you read this tutorial you should be able to use
exmh for your basic daily mail reading needs. You will
learn how to send mail, read mail, manage your messages in
folders, and adjust some of the exmh features by means of
its Preferences user interface.
There is much more documentation available on-line through
HTML pages that are viewable from within exmh. In partic
ular. exmh-use provides information about using the more
advanced features of exmh. If you are already an experi
enced email user, you may want to just read the GETTING
STARTED section here and then skip to the exmh-use man
page. exmh-custom describes how to customize exmh to suit
your needs. exmh-ref lists each button and menu entry in
exmh and explains what they do. If you are an experienced
exmh user, this may be the most useful man page for you.
A cleaned up version of these man pages appear in the 3rd
edition of the book by Jerry Peek, MH & xmh: email for
users and programmers, which is published by O'Reilly &
Associates.
Web versions of the documentation can also be found at
http://www.beedub.com/exmh/
GETTING STARTED
If you are already an MH or xmh user, you can start with
the examples given in this tour. If you are a new user,
exmh will set up your basic MH environment. This includes
a Mail directory which will have one subdirectory for each
mail folder, plus several files that MH mail uses for its
own purposes. You also get a ~/.mh_profile file that has
user settings for MH and exmh.
Exmh uses the regular MH programs to manipulate your mail
folders and messages. This means it is compatible with
command-line use of MH programs, and its actions should be
familar if you are an experienced MH user. If you are a
new MH user, then the details of running MH programs is
hidden behind the graphical interface. The MH programs
used by exmh are described towards the end of this man
page.
When you run exmh for the first time it checks a few
things in your MH profile. In particular, it depends on
the Draft-Folder and Unseen-Sequence profile components.
If these profile components are not present, a dialog
appears and exmh can set them up for you. If you do not
let exmh create them nor set them up by hand, exmh will
not work properly. These profile entries are described in
the exmh-ref man page.
Exmh has been designed to be very flexible, although it
will work just fine "out of the box". The Preference
package used to adjust some of the settings in exmh is
introduced in this man page, and some of the important
settings are described here. A more complete guide to
customizing exmh is given in the exmh-custom man page.
RUNNING EXMH
The command to start exmh looks like this:
exmh-display hostname:0 &
If your DISPLAY environment variable is set up properly,
then the -display argument is not needed, and the command
is even simpler. You do not need to specify a -geometry
argument, although exmh supports one. Instead, simply
position and size the window using your window manager.
When exmh quits, it saves the geometry information so you
don't have to worry about it. It does this with all its
top level windows, so you can adjust their position once
and then forget about it. There are more command line
options described in the exmh-ref man page.
You can add the exmh command to your startup X environment
by editting your startup file (like .xsession). You might
also want to add it to the main menu of your window man
ager. The details about this vary from X system to X sys
tem, so ask your local X guru for help. Exmh also sup
ports the window manager session protocol, which means
that session-smart window managers will automatically
start exmh for you if you quit X when exmh is running.
THE EXMH DISPLAY
This section describes the main parts of the exmh display.
It probably makes sense to run exmh at this point so you
can follow along. There are three sets of buttons in the
interface, and three main subwindows.
Main Buttons. Along the top of the window is a set of
buttons and menus that apply to exmh itself. Quit, for
example, quits exmh. The Help button pops up a menu, and
you can select the entries there to get more on-line
information about exmh. Use the left mouse button to
select the buttons and menus. A button will change its
appearence when you press it, and it will be invoked when
you release the mouse over the button. If you slide the
mouse off the button before releasing it, nothing happens.
Folder Display. Below the main buttons is the folder dis
play subwindow. It has a special button for each of your
top-level folders, and these are called folder labels. As
a new user you will see two folder labels, one for inbox
and drafts. The inbox folder is for your new messages,
and the drafts folder is for messages you are writing. If
you have used MH (or xmh) before, then you may have many
more folders that will appear in this display. The mouse
bindings for folder labels are explained in the exmh-use
man page. The Color Legend from the Help menu also tells
you how the folder labels respond to mouse clicks.
Folder Cache. A second folder display called the folder
cache may appear under the main folder display. This
shows the folder labels for recently used folders. If you
only have a few folders this wastes screen real estate.
The PREFERENCES section near the end of this man page
explains how to turn this off via the Folder Cache prefer
ences setting. If you are a first-time exmh user, Exmh
tries to guess if you need this display based on the num
ber of folders and nested folders you have.
Folder Buttons. The middle set of buttons is for opera
tions that apply to folders. For example, you can create
a new folder with the New button here. The More... button
displays a popup menu with several more operations you can
apply to folders. Some of these buttons will be intro
duced in this man page. All of these buttons and menus
are explained in detail in the exmh-ref man page.
To the left of the folder buttons, summary information
about the current folder is displayed.
Table of Contents. The middle subwindow of the display
shows a summary of the messages in the folder. It shows
the message number, the date of the mesage, the subject of
the message, and, space permitting, the first few words of
the message. Left click on a line in the table of con
tents to view the corresponding message. The mouse bind
ings for the table of contents are described in more
detail in the exmh-use man page.
MH experts: The display in this window comes from both the
MH scan program or MH inc programs, so it is affected by
the form specification used by these programs.
Color and Monochrome Highlights. Both the folder display
and table of contents windows use highlights to give you
visual clues about the state of messages and folders.
Your unread messages are highlighted in the table of con
tents and the folders that contain unread message are
highlighted in the folder display. Pull down the main
Help menu and select Color Legend to display a key to the
highlights for your display. The highlighting is covered
in more detail later in the exmh-use man page. The exmh-
custom man page tells how you can control the highlighting
yourself.
Status Line. Just below the table of contents is the sta
tus line. This has two parts. The left part shows the
name of the folder and the message number for the current
message, if any. The right part gives feedback about what
exmh is doing. After it displays a message, the Subject
component is displayed there.
Subwindow Resize Diamond. The black diamond to the right
of the status line is used to change the size of the
internal windows. Press the first mouse button on this
target and a horizontal line appears. Drag it up and down
to adjust the window sizes. Try dragging it all the way
to the top and bottom of the exmh window to see how the
mode changes to adjust different windows.
Message Buttons The bottom row of buttons are for opera
tions that apply to the current message. Several of these
operations will be introduced in this man page. The right
hand button labeled More... brings up a menu with several
more advanced message operations.
Hint: Many of these message operations have keyboard
shortcuts that make it easy to use exmh with your hands on
the keyboard. Some of the short-cuts are introduced in
this man page, and all of them are listed in the exmh-use
man page.
Message Display. The bottom subwindow displays the cur
rent message, if any. Some of the less interesting mail
headers start out scrolled off the top of this window.
SENDING MAIL
A good way to test things out is to send a message to
yourself. Here are the steps you take to do that:
1. Click the Send button, which is in the Message buttons
in the bottom group. A new window will open that contains
the template for your message. The built-in editor, which
is called sedit, will start out with the insert cursor
positioned at the end of the first empty header line.
Enter your user name after the To: header. If you want to
send the message to more than one person, use a comma to
separate the names.
2. Position the insert cursor on the next header line.
You can do this a few different ways. The most direct way
is to click the left mouse button where you want the cur
sor to be. There are keyboard shortcuts, too. If you
press <Tab> the editor will take you to the end of the
next header line. You can also use the arrow keys or some
emacs-like bindings to move the cursor. <Control-n> goes
to the next line, <Control-f> moves the cursor forward a
character. <Control-p> moves up a line, and <Control-b>
moves back a character. The Simple Edit menu entry shows
you all the keybindings.
3. The next header is the Cc: line. People listed in the
Cc: line get a "courtesy" (or "carbon") copy of the mes
sage. By convention, the message is primarily for the
people listed in the To: component, and the people in the
Cc: component are getting the message "for information."
In this case, you can leave the Cc: component empty.
Move the insert cursor to the Subject: line and enter a
Subject. The people that receive your message will get an
idea of what the message is about from the subject, so
take a moment to think of a good one. For this test, you
can type something like "exmh test message".
4. Make sure the headers are OK. In particular, make
sure there are no blank lines in the headers. The mail
system treats a blank line as meaning "end-of-headers", so
you don't want to prematurely end the header section. If
you have a blank line, position the insert cursor on it
and use Backspace to remove the empty line.
Position the cursor at the start of the message body. You
can use the mouse for this, or you can press <Tab> twice
quickly and the editor will position the cursor correctly.
When using the default MH message templates, this will be
right after the line of all dashes.
5. Type in your message. When you type in a long mes
sage, the lines will wrap automatically at word bound
aries. To get a blank line for paragraph boundaries,
press <Return>. The built-in editor supports several
editting commands that are based on the GNU emacs key
bindings. If you select the Simple Edit menu entry under
the main Bindings menu, you will bring up a dialog that
lets you view and edit the key bindings.
6. If you are happy with the message, you send it by
pressing the Send button at the top-right corner of the
window. The Send button will turn grey, and the window
will disappear once the message has been sent succesfully.
If you do not want to send the message, press the Abort
button instead. If you want to save the message draft and
continue to work on it later, press the Save&Quit button.
Working on a saved draft message is described in the exmh-
use man page.
Send yourself a few messages, or have a friend send you a
few test messages. You will use these test messages to
practice moving around in a folder and deleting messages.
Make one of the messages pretty long so you can practice
scrolling through it.
Finally, try sending mh-mime-sample@online.ora.com a mes
sage. This addresses a program that will return a MIME
message to you. Just put this address in the To field
with anything as the message body and subject. Reading
this message will be described below.
MOUSING AROUND
The selection is dragged out with the left mouse button.
You can modify the selection by holding the Shift key
while pressing the left button. A double-click begins a
word-oriented selection, and a triple-click begins a line-
oriented selection. If you drag a selection off the bot
tom or top of a window the text will be scrolled automati
cally and the selection will be extended.
Paste is done with the middle mouse button. The current
insert point is used, not the point at which you middle-
click. If you drag the middle mouse button, then the win
dow is scrolled instead as described below. There is also
a key-binding for paste, which is <Control-y>. Use <Con
trol-w> or the <Delete> key to delete the selection.
The middle mouse button is used for "drag-scrolling". To
scroll, simply press the middle mouse button over the text
and drag the text. If you press the Shift key, the
scrolling is faster. Drag-scrolling works in the text
widgets, for vertical scrolling, and the one-line entry
widgets, for horizontal scrolling. The text widgets are
used to display the folder contents and the current mes
sage. The entry widgets are used in various dialogs in
order to enter values. You can change the scrolling but
ton to the right button or to only work with shift-middle.
Set this up in the Simple Edit Bindings... dialog.
Buttons and menus are also sensitive to which mouse button
is pressed. Only the left button activates a button, and
it is the <ButtonRelease> event that is important. If you
accidentally move the mouse off of the button as you
release it, nothing will happen. Don't worry, the wrong
button will not be invoked.
Press the left button over a menubutton to pull down a
menu. Most of the menus in exmh are distinguished with a
"..." in their label, e.g. "More...". The menu will go
away when the button is released. Release the mouse but
ton off the menu if you do not want to invoke any menu
item. (In some versions of Tk, the middle button will
"tear off" a Tk menu. This is quite handy if you use the
menu often. To get the menu to go away, you must click
the left button over the menubutton. This will reattach
the menu to the menubutton, and another left click will
make the menu go away. In the latest versions of Tk, the
first menu entry is a dashed line that invokes this tear-
off operation.)
GETTING NEW MAIL
By now you should have some new mail waiting. Press the
Inc button from the middle set of buttons that do Folder
operations. This will transfer messages from your system
spool file into your inbox folder. You will hear an audi
ble cue if there was new mail, and the table of contents
will be updated to reflect the new messages in your inbox.
New messages will be underlined (on a monochrome screen),
or blue (on a color screen), to indicate that you have not
read them yet.
To view the new message, click on its line in the table of
contents, or press the Next button in the bottom group of
buttons. The message will be displayed in the bottom sub
window, and the line in the table of contents will be
highlighted to remind you which message is being dis
played.
To view the next message, click the Next button. The key
board shortcut for this is the 'n' key.
The view the previous message, click the Prev button. The
keyboard shortcut for this is the 'p' key.
Scrolling through messages. If you get a message that is
too long to fit into the message window, then the scroll
bar will change its appearance to indicate how much text
is displayed. The scrollbar is Motif-like. You can click
on the arrows at either end to go up and down one line.
If you click above or below the elevator box you go up and
down one page. You can drag the elevator box to scroll,
too.
You can also scroll text windows in exmh by dragging with
the middle mouse button. Press the middle button over the
text area, not the scrollbar, and hold it down while you
move the mouse up or down. If you hold the shift key at
the same time, the scrolling is faster. This works in the
folder Table of Contents window, too.
Hint. The space bar is a keyboard short-cut that does a
combination of scrolling and advancing to the next mes
sage. If the message is long, then space will scroll by
one screen. Once you are at the end of the message, space
will advance to the next message, just like the 'n' key.
You can use the BackSpace key to scroll back through a
message.
READING MIME MESSAGES
By now you should have also received the sample MIME mes
sage from mh-mime-sample@online.ora.com. The MIME message
has three parts to it, and these are numbered and labeled
in the display. The first part is a multipart/alternative
content, which means there are a few different ways to
view the content. This is indicated by the message under
the heading 1. that there are alternative views of the
following content. Exmh will go ahead and display what it
thinks is the best alternative, and you see the
text/enriched content displayed in part 1.2. If you want
to see the other alternatives, then you can press the
right button over section 1 to get a popup menu with some
choices.
The next two parts are an audio clip and a picture in GIF
format. The audio clip is handled directly by exmh, and
it displays two active text buttons labeled "Play attached
audio" and "Save audio file". Click on either of these
with the left mouse button. The part corresponding to the
image displays a message about what the type is, and sug
gests that you press the right mouse button to display a
menu. You can always press the right button to get a MIME
menu that has type-specific options for parts of your mes
sage. If you press the right button over part 2., then
the popup menu will offer you these choices:
Decode part as MIME
Save Hello from the author...
View using mailcap rule...
Pass an audio fragment to metamail...
The first item is a checkbox menu item that lets you view
the raw content if you want to. The Save... menu entry
displays a file selection box so you can choose a non-tem
porary file to store the content. This same function is
available through the text button, but not all MIME parts
displays buttons like this. The next two entries should
result in the same thing. They use the mailcap specifica
tions to run another program that displays the content.
In the first case, View using mailcap rule..., exmh runs
the program directly. In the other case, Pass to meta
mail..., the metamail program is run first, and it decodes
the mailcap file and runs the external program. Again,
the text button labeled "Play attached audio" also plays
the audio.
REPLYING TO MAIL
Select one of the messages from your friend that you'd
like to answer. Press the left button over the Reply...
menu button. A menu with a few entries will be displayed.
Select the Reply to sender menu entry by dragging the
mouse down to that entry and letting up over it. The menu
entry has a <Key-r> in it, which means that you could also
press the 'r' key to invoke this function.
This time the built-in editor will open a window with a
message that is partly filled in. All the headers are
initialized based on the header components from the origi
nal message. The built-in editor will automatically posi
tion the cursor at the begining of the message body. You
can enter your reply message like you did with the previ
ous messages. You should also double-check the header
components. In this case, add yourself to the Cc: compo
nent so you will get a copy of the reply message. When
you are done, press the Send button in the editor window
to send the message.
There are a number of ways to control the format of your
reply messages. The MH repl command has several format
ting options, and because exmh uses repl to set up the
reply message, you can customize your reply format. Exmh
lets you define several variations on reply and add them
to the Reply... menu. This is described in the exmh-cus
tom man page.
It should not take long for you to get the copy of the
reply message. Wait a minute or so and press the Inc but
ton. The keyboard short-cut for Inc is the 'i' key.
SELECTING MESSAGES
Before we go on to more things you can do with messages,
we need to talk about selecting multiple messages at once.
Several of the message operations in exmh can operate on a
set of messages. You can manually select multiple mes
sages by using the mouse, or you can select messages based
on their content.
Using the Mouse. To select messages with the mouse, press
the left button and then drag out a selection. This will
select a contiguous range of messages. If the messages
you want to select are not so nicely organized, you can
make a disjoint selection by holding down the Shift key
while making your selection. This adds new messages to
the selection. If you shift-click on a message that is
already selected, then it becomes unselected. If you need
to select a lot of messages, simply drag the mouse off the
top or bottom of the window. It will be scrolled automat
ically and the selection will be extended.
SEARCHING
The Search... menu has several operations for finding mes
sages and finding text within a message. There is also a
help entry that explains searching in more detail.
If you select "Find in message body" or "Find in table of
contents" a small search dialog appears. Enter the search
string and use the Next or Prev buttons to find the next
match. When you are searching over the table of contents,
you can select All to select all matching messages.
The other way to search a folder is with "Pick by
attributes". The MH pick program is used to search the
current folder for messages that match mail headers like
From or Subject. You can build up boolean expressions
among search criteria. This is a much more general search
mechanism than the "Find in table of contents" operation.
Get started in the Pick dialog by pressing the "Choose
pick attribute" button. A menu of attribute types
appears, including the Subject, From, To, and Cc header
components. You can type a regular expression pattern in
these entries to search for messages that have a matching
header component.
The Before and After attributes are dates. You can find
all messages before or after a given date by using these
fields. You can specify dates as mm/dd/yy. Be sure to
include the year. Dates can also be keywords like
"today", "yesterday", "tomorrow", and any day of the week
("Sunday", "Monday", and so on.)
The Search attribute is used to search for something in
the body of a message. This will run little slower
because pick must read through all of your messages, not
just their headers.
If you select more than one attribute, pick finds messages
that match all the criteria. In otherwords, it does the
logical and of the search criteria. If you want to search
for this or that, then you need to press the Or button in
the dialog. This adds another set of fields to the dia
log, and pick will search for everthing that matches the
first set or matches the second set.
The "Add to Sel" checkbutton should be set before you do
the search. This controls whether or not the selected
messages are added to any existing selection.
Finally, use the "Pick" button to do the search. Once the
search has completed you can perform a few operations on
the selection. You can delete and refile messages as
described later. You can also display a new table of con
tents that only contains the selected messages. Use the
"New FTOC" button for this. You can also clear the unseen
state of the messages with the "Mark Seen" button.
The "Clear" button resets the fields.
The two entries in the dialog are used to control MH
sequences. The only sequence exmh really supports well is
the "unseen" sequence, although you can define up to 10
sequences in each folder.
If you use New FTOC to get a new scan listing, it would be
better if it appeared in a new window, but currently it
replaces the table of contents. You can move around and
manipulate messages in this table of contents. However,
if you do another pick, it will only find things in this
limited table of contents, not the whole folder. (Yes,
this is a bug .) Use the Rescan Folder menu entry in the
folder More... menu to get a complete folder listing.
FORWARDING MESSAGES
If you want to send someone a copy of a message or mes
sages that you have received, use the Forward message
operation. Select the messages as described in the previ
ous section, then press the Forward button. The keyboard
short-cut for forward is the 'f' key.
The message template will have a copy of the selected mes
sages. You fill in the headers, and you can also add a
short message before the start of the forwarded messages.
When you are done, press Send to forward the messages.
DELETING MESSAGES
After you have read a message, you might want to remove it
to keep your mail folders tidy. Exmh uses two steps to
remove mail. In the first step you mark a message as
being deleted. In the second step you commit the opera
tions on all marked messages. It turns out that delete
just renames your message files. They will survive until
you get another message by the same number and remove it,
too. In addition, exmh has a "Purge Folder" operation
that removes these renamed files if they are more than a
week old.
The Delete operation applies to the current message, or
you can also select a range of messages by dragging out a
selection in the table of contents. You can delete the
current message(s) by pressing the Delete button. The
keyboard short-cut is the 'd' key. The deleted message(s)
will be highlighted after the delete operation so you can
easily see the state of the message. On a monochrome
screen, a cross hatching will be drawn through the table
of contents line for the message. On a color screen, the
table of contents line will get a dark grey background.
After you mark a message for delete, you are automatically
advanced to the next message. This makes it easy to go
through your folder and clean it up. Click 'd' to delete,
or click 'n' to leave it alone.
Hint. If you are really in a hurry, use 'D' and 'N' as
your keyboard short-cuts. This prevents the next message
from being displayed, which can be slow for complex multi-
media messages.
When you are ready to commit the pending delete actions,
press the Commit button. The keyboard shortcut for commit
is <Control-Return>.
If you decide you do not want to delete a message you can
unmark it. Use the Unmark (Undo) menu entry that is under
the message More... menu. The unmark operation applies to
the current message or messages, so you have to select the
messages to unmark first. The keyboard short-cut for
unmark is 'u'.
Hint. The minus, '-', keyboard shortcut takes you to the
previous message, even if it has been marked for delete.
Ordinarily the Prev operation, and the 'p' short-cut for
it, will skip over marked messages.
LEAVING EXMH
Press the Quit button to leave exmh. It will take a few
moments to close down because it saves some state informa
tion before quitting. The Quit button will grey out after
you click it, and you will see a few status messages as it
shuts itself down.
PREFERENCES
Try out the Preferences by turning off the folder cache.
This just takes up display space if you don't have many
folders. If you have lots of nested folders, though, you
might even want to make this display bigger!
Click the Preference button, which brings up a dialog that
has buttons for several of the modules that make up exmh.
Click on the Folder Cache button to bring up the prefer
ence items that control the folder cache. In this case
there are just two items: the number of lines of labels in
the cache, and the names of folders that are always in the
cache. Click in the first field and backspace over the
default value of 1. Type in 0 instead, and press
<Return>. Voila! The folder cache disappears.
If you like this setting, press Save one the main Prefer
ence dialog and your changes will be saved to a file named
~/.exmh-defaults. Press Reset if you want to undo your
changes. You should be a little careful here, because you
are allowed to Dismiss the preference dialog without sav
ing.
Another useful preference item to set is under Background
Processing. You can arrange for exmh to periodically run
inc so your messages are automatcially transferred into
your inbox. The advantage of doing this is that the
folder label highlighting works best this way. Unfortu
nately, exmh does not give you any visual clues when mail
is only waiting in your system spool file.
More details about the Preferences dialog are given in the
exmh-use man page, and an overview of the various prefer
ence sections is given in the exmh-custom man page..
WHAT IS MH MAIL?
MH is a collection of UNIX programs that store, manipu
late, and display your mail. MH originated from RAND, and
it is now in the public domain. Exmh uses these programs
to do all the hard work, while it concentrates on the user
interface.
You can use the MH programs to read your mail. Run them
from the UNIX command line like you would cd, ls, cc, or
make. They are useful when you are connecting over a slow
line or cannot run exmh for some other reason. For more
details, there are individual man pages for each MH pro
gram, plus one overview man page called MH. Below is a
short summary of the main MH programs used by exmh.
folder Query or set the current folder.
inc Incorporate mail from your system spool file into
your folders.
scan Display a listing of a mail folder.
show Display a mail message.
next Display the next mail message. (Exmh doesn't actu
ally run this.)
prev Display the previous mail message. (Exmh doesn't
actually run this.)
rmm Delete a mail message.
refile Move a message into another mail folder.
repl Reply to a mail message
forw Forward one or more mail messages.
comp Compose a new mail message.
MH keeps track of the current folder and the current mes
sage in between uses of these MH programs. For example:
% scan +inbox unseen
1713 04/14 foote.PARC@xerox. Have you started blasting cdroms yet?<<Probably.
1715 04/14 FlashBack Publish 1232: Tactix Introduces Break through in Unix Ad
1716 04/14 FlashBack Publish 1234: CERT Advisory - NCSA HTTP Daemon for UNIX<
1717 M04/15 To:welch PGP test<<-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: 2
1718 M04/17 flash@flashback.c mime-flashback-w MIME FlashBack April 13th, 1995
1719 -04/16 Bill Wohler Notes for MH Chapters 20-22<<Brent, I have been
1720+-04/17 "Allen R. Carl" Re: Tabs<<Brent, where is this -tabs resource se
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Each user has a .mh_profile file that stores general MH
settings as well as per-command settings. Each line has a
key, and a value. For example, your mail directory is set
with the Path profile entry:
Path: Mail
If your old mail system uses that directory already, just
edit your .mh_profile to change the name used for your MH
mail folders.
MORE ABOUT EXMH
This man page should get you started with exmh. If you
decide you want to know more about it, here are some of
the features described in the other exmh man pages.
MIME support. Exmh can display MIME (Multipurpose Inter
net Mail Extensions) messages, either directly or with the
help of the metamail package. The built-in editor lets
you compose enriched text messages and insert files as
parts of a multipart message.
Mail Folders. You can create other mail folders to hold
messages about certain topics or from certain people. You
can create a hierarchical arrangement of folders, just
like the hierarchical directory structure of the file sys
tem. The folder display supports these nested folders,
and it allows you to nest folders to any depth.
Mail Filtering. Mail filtering lets you sort mail into
different folders before you read it. If you get lots of
mail, this is a great way to avoid plowing through junk
mail just to get your important messages. The folder
labels are highlighted to indicate which folders have
unread mail in them.
Facesaver bitmap display. If you have a facesaver
database on your system, exmh displays the bitmap face of
the person that sent the current message (or their organi
zation).
Background processing. You can set exmh to run inc peri
odically, check for new mesages arriving asynchronously in
folders, run the MH msgchk program, or count up the mes
sages in your mail spool file.
Editor interface. You can hook exmh to your favorite edi
tor using the exmh-async script. Or, Tcl-based editors
such as mxedit can interact with exmh directly.
Keybinding User Interface. You can define new key bind
ings for Tcl commands that are part of the implementation.
Aliases User Interface. A browser for your MH aliases
lets you define new aliases and insert aliases into mail
messages.
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). If you have PGP, you can use
it from exmh to digitally sign, encrypt, and decrypt mes
sages.
User Programming. If the preference settings are not
enough for you, you can program exmh more directly. You
can define new buttons and menus and add new Tcl code to
its implementation.
SEE ALSO
exmh-use, exmh-ref, exmh-custom, mh
AUTHOR
Brent Welch, <welch@acm.org>
THANKS
To Xerox PARC/CSL, for supporting this work initially, to
Sun Microsystems Laboratories for continuing the support,
and to all the exmh users that contributed ideas and code.
Exmh 2.0 December 3, 1996 EXMH TOUR(1)
