MMDF, Smail and Elm Mailer

[Dan Heller]

In article <8911202358.AA14298 at decwrl.dec.com> paine at fungus.dec.com (Willy Paine) writes:
> I recently upgrade to SCO UNIX from Xenix/386.  SCO Unix comes with MMDF
> and Sendmail and MMDF is driving me nuts!!   I am trying to get rid of
> MMDF, especially  ^A^A^A^A in /usr/spool/mail area because ELM does not
> like this at all and I get error message:

Elm doesn't understand MMDF format, but Mush does.  Altho I am biased
towards mush for obvious reasons, I encourage you to use it because it
talks MMDF and that seems to be better than sendmail for XENIX machines.
Mush is also far more configurable about the MTA it talks to and the
format of the folders that it reads.  And in addition to the wider
spectrum of user interfaces and other features that mush provides over Elm,
Mush is also much faster than Elm (while using much less memory).

> Elm works fine ONLY after I delete ^A^A^A^A (real ctl-A).  I want to get
> rid of this control characters.   I have ELM v2 PL0 and I still dont
This is because XENIX's MMDF not only uses the ^A^A^A^A line to separate
messages, but it also uses the From_ line to do it.  It's questionable
whether this is "correct" or not, but suffice to say that most MMDF's
don't do this.  I tread water here in face of those MMDF users who know
better :-)  I trust they'll correct me if I'm wrong.

dan