/bin/mail replacement (next generation of mailx)

[Dmitry Butskoy]

I would like to propose upgrade the "mailx" package (cmdline /bin/mail 
interface) to the newer source from the Heirloom project: 
http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html . The new source is derived 
from the old one and is fully compatible with it.

Such a replacement (from old bsd mailx-8.1.x to the Heirloom's 
mailx-12.x) is already done in OpenSuse and Slackware.

Initially, the project was named as "nail". Since the version of 12.x it 
was renamed to the ordinary name of "mailx", (because the original 
mailx-8.x no more developed). Under the name of "nail" it is already in 
Fedora. I continue to maintain it as "nail", while the original 
mailx-8.x is used.

Mailx-12.x adds a lot of useful functionality to the "cmdline mail 
command", which seems to be expected long years ago. Without it, some 
tasks can be performed only by TUI or even GUI applications, which makes 
impossible to automate things by scripts.

My initial motivation to add nail/mailx to Fedora was inspired by the 
time of switching to Dovecot IMAP server and recommendation to switch 
from mailbox to Maildir format. The current /bin/mail do not work with 
Maildir, hence it cannot be used for reading mail from cmdline at all 
(until you still use mailbox format). Besides the Maildir support (which 
looks like a strong requirement for the upgrading), there are such 
features as MIME support, encodings, attachments, POP3/IMAP, direct 
SMTP, SSL etc., see http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html

Note, that SSL support can be provided either by OpenSSL or by NSS. The 
use of NSS matches the recent requirements of Fedora's "Security 
Consolidation".

Any comments?


Dmitry Butskoy
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DmitryButskoy