Time to Upgrade Our E-Mail Programs?

Jul 12 15:33 UTC 2002

I was wondering if there was a more modern e-mailer available for
us.  I am having two persistent problems, which I think are signs
of our present e-mailer's obsolescence.  (I type "!mail" to get
my mail.)
        First, I get a variety of e-mails with serious formatting
problems.  For example, every line ends with =, and paragraphs
end with =20.  Or bizarre combinations of characters show up
instead of quotation marks and other standard punctuations.
Or the e-mail is mangled by the insertion of a variety of html
codes.  At present I have to copy these e-mails into my wordprocessor
and fix them before they are useable.  Is there an e-mail program
with an "ASCII converter" which can filter these problems out
and give me standard ASCII characters?
        Second, a lot of people persist in wanting to send me
attachments, despite my attempts at discouraging them.  
        Since we're talking about the Grex of the future in
Item 113, I thought I'd start this separate item to discuss
*only* upgrades in our e-mail service.

response 2 of 6:

Jul 12 16:27 UTC 2002

If you only get the occasional attachment, there are various tools that
can just decode them, that would work even with mailx.  I'm not sure
just what we have available on grex, but at work, I find I usually use
"munpack" to deal with the few attachments or especially badly formatted
email that I want to read even though mh could -- I tried mh's built-in
MIME support and decided it was more painful than seeing those =.

response 6 of 6:

Jul 13 18:58 UTC 2002

Well, I think their general feeling is, ``if you want MIME, run exmh.''
Okay, I can *kind* of see the argument, but it doesn't work all that
well with remote mail servers.