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NMH(7mh) NMH(7mh) NAME nmh - overview of the new MH message system DESCRIPTION nmh is the name of a powerful message handling system. Rather than being a single comprehen‐ sive program, nmh consists of a collection of fairly simple single-purpose programs to send, retrieve, save, and manipulate messages. Unlike most mail clients in Unix, nmh is not a closed system which must be explicitly run, then exited when you wish to return to the shell. You may freely intersperse nmh commands with other shell commands, allowing you to read and answer your mail while you have (for ex‐ ample) a compilation running, or search for a file or run programs as needed to find the an‐ swer to someone's question before answering their mail. The rest of this manual entry is a quick tutorial which will teach you the basics of nmh. You should read the manual entries for the individual programs for complete documentation (see the section on COMMANDS below). To get started using nmh, put the directory “/usr/bin/mh” in your $PATH. Run the install-mh command. If you've never used nmh before, it will create the necessary default files and di‐ rectories after asking you if you wish it to do so. inc moves mail from your system mail drop into your nmh “+inbox” folder, breaking it up into separate files and converting it to nmh format. It prints one line for each message it processes, containing the from field, the subject field and as much of the first line of the message as will fit. It leaves the first message it processes as your current message. You'll need to run inc each time you wish to incorporate new mail into your nmh file. scan prints a list of the messages in your current folder. The commands show, next, and prev are used to read specific messages from the current folder. show displays the current message, or a specific message specified by its number which is passed as an argument. next and prev display, respectively, the message numerically after or before the current message. In all cases, the message displayed becomes the current message. If there is no current message, show may be called with an argument, or next may be used to advance to the first message. rmm (remove message) deletes the current message. It may be called, with message numbers passed as arguments, to delete specific messages. repl is used to respond to the current message (by default). It places you in the editor with a prototype response form. While you're in the editor, you may peruse the item you're responding to by reading the file @. After completing your response, type “l” to list (re‐ view) it, or “s” to send it. comp allows you to compose a message by putting you in the editor on a prototype message form, and then lets you send it via the whatnow command. whatnow also supports easy-to-use management of MIME attachments via its attach and related responses, as described in its man page. nmh command arguments are usually called switches. Some switches have a corresponding “-no” switch, which negates all previous occurrences of that switch on the command line. This al‐ lows a user to conveniently override, on the command line, a switch in their profile. Switches may be abbreviated as long as there is no ambiguity with another switch of the same command. To avoid ambiguity with any switches that may be added in the future, it is recom‐ mended that full switch names be used in durable code such as shell scripts, functions, and aliases. Each nmh command may be run with the single switch -help, which causes it to print its avail‐ able switches, along with any profile components that apply, and then exit. All the nmh commands may be run with the single switch -version, which causes them to print the version number of the nmh distribution, and then exit. Commands which take a message number as an argument (scan, show, repl, ...) also take one of the words “first”, “prev”, “cur”, “next”, or “last” to indicate (respectively) the first, previous, current, next, or last message in the current folder (assuming they are defined). As a shorthand, “.” is equivalent to “cur”. Commands which take a range of message numbers (rmm, scan, show, ...) also take any of the abbreviations: <num1>-<num2> Indicates all messages in the range <num1> to <num2>, inclusive. The range must be nonempty. all Indicates all messages, i.e., first-last. <num>:+N <num>:-N Up to N, where N must be a positive number, messages beginning with (or end‐ ing with) message num. Num may be any of the pre-defined symbols first, prev, cur, next or last. The + can be omitted. first:N prev:N next:N last:N As many of the first, previous, next, or last N messages that exist. As above, N can be preceded with - to end the listing at the specified message, or with an optional +. Commands that take a folder name (inc, refile, scan, ...) accept the folder name in two for‐ mats: “+folder” or “@folder”. In both cases, “folder” can be a “/”-separated path, e.g. “foo/bar”. “+folder” specifies a directory path to a folder. If “folder” starts with “/” then it's an absolute path from the root directory. If it is “.” or “..”, or starts with “./” or “../”, then it's relative to the current working directory. Otherwise it's relative to mh-profile(5)'s “Path”, i.e. as given by `mhpath +`. “@folder” is a shorthand for “+cur‐ folder/folder”; it's a relative path from the current folder. “curfolder” is given by `mh‐ path`. For example, assuming a Path profile component of Mail, scan +inbox scans $HOME/Mail/inbox scan +work/todo scans $HOME/Mail/work/todo scan @todo scans $HOME/Mail/work/todo, if current folder is +work refile @../done refiles to $HOME/Mail/work/done, if the current folder is +work/todo scan +/tmp scans /tmp scan +. scans the current directory refile @. refiles current message to end of current folder. There are many other possibilities such as creating multiple folders for different topics, and automatically refiling messages according to subject, source, destination, or content. These are beyond the scope of this manual entry. COMMANDS Following is a list of all the nmh commands, grouped loosely according to their role. Sending comp(1) compose a message forw(1) forward messages repl(1) reply to a message whatnow(1) prompting front-end for send Note that although whatnow provides much of the primary nmh user interface for sending mail, it is almost never invoked manually, but rather is invoked indirectly by one of the above commands, after you've composed a message in your editor, and before you've decided to send it. Here you can add attachments, check the recipient list, decide to quit and send it later, etc. Related utilities: ali(1) list mail aliases anno(1) annotate messages whom(1) report to whom a message would go dist(1) redistribute a message to additional addresses Advanced commands, only sometimes invoked directly: mhbuild(1) translate MIME composition draft send(1) send a message sendfiles(1) send multiple files in a MIME message Incorporating inc(1) incorporate new mail Related utilities: burst(1) explode digests into messages msgchk(1) check for messages rcvdist(1) asynchronously redistribute new mail rcvpack(1) append message to file rcvstore(1) asynchronously incorporate new mail slocal(1) asynchronously filter and deliver new mail Viewing next(1) show the next message prev(1) show the previous message show(1) show (display) messages scan(1) produce a one line per message scan listing fnext(1) select the next folder with new messages fprev(1) select the previous folder with new messages Related utilities, only sometimes invoked directly: mhl(1) produce formatted listings of nmh messages mhlist(1) list information about content of MIME messages mhn(1) display/list/store MIME messages mhshow(1) display MIME messages mhstore(1) store contents of MIME messages into files Searching Within a folder: pick(1) select messages by content Across folders: new(1) list folders with new messages unseen(1) list new messages in a given set of folders flist(1) list folders with messages in given sequence(s) flists(1) list all folders with messages in given sequence(s) folder(1) set/list current folder/message folders(1) list all folders Organizing mark(1) mark messages refile(1) file messages in other folders rmf(1) remove folder rmm(1) remove messages sortm(1) sort messages Convenience Wrappers mhmail(1) send or read mail Utilities mhfixmsg(1) rewrite MIME messages with various transformations mhparam(1) print nmh profile components mhpath(1) print full pathnames of nmh messages and folders packf(1) compress a folder into a single file prompter(1) prompting editor front end rcvtty(1) report new mail Indirectly Invoked Commands ap(8) parse addresses RFC 822-style dp(8) parse dates RFC 822-style fmtdump(8) decode mh-format(5) files install-mh(8) initialize the nmh environment post(8) deliver a message Files Used by nmh Commands mh-alias(5) alias file for nmh message system mh-format(5) format file for nmh message system mh-profile(5) user customization for nmh message system mh-tailor(5) mail transport customization for nmh message system Formats mh-draft(5) draft folder facility mh-folders(5) nmh message storage format specification mh-mail(5) message format for nmh message system mh-sequence(5) sequence specification for nmh message system FILES /usr/bin/mh contains nmh commands /etc/nmh contains nmh format files /usr/lib/mh contains nmh library commands $HOME/.mh_profile The user's nmh profile SEE ALSO install-mh(1), mh-profile(5), mh-chart(7), mh-mime(7) BUGS Send bug reports, questions, suggestions, and patches to nmh-workers AT nongnu.org. That mail‐ ing list is relatively quiet, so user questions are encouraged. Users are also encouraged to subscribe, and view the archives, at https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers . If problems are encountered with an nmh program, they should be reported to the local main‐ tainers of nmh, if any, or to the mailing list noted above. When doing this, the name of the program should be reported, along with the version information for the program. To find out what version of an nmh program is being run, invoke the program with the -version switch. This prints the version of nmh, the host it was compiled on, and the date the pro‐ gram was linked. New releases, and other information of potential interest, are announced at http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/ nmh-1.8 2016-09-26 NMH(7mh)
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