W e l c o m e  t o  S - n a i l/ S - m a i l x
==============================================

S-nail (later S-mailx) is a mail processing system with a command
syntax reminiscent of ed(1) with lines replaced by messages.
It is intended to provide the functionality of the POSIX mailx(1)
command, but is MIME capable and optionally offers extensions for
line editing, IDNA, MIME, S/MIME, SMTP and POP3 (and IMAP).
It is usable as a mail batch language.

Please refer to the file "INSTALL" for build and installation remarks,
and to "NEWS" for release update information.  The file "THANKS"
mentions people who have helped improving and deserve acknowledgement.

This software originates in the codebase of Heirloom mailx, formerly
known as nail, which itself is based upon Berkeley Mail that has
a history back to 1978 and which superseded Unix mail, a program that
already shipped with First Edition Unix from 1971 -- M. Douglas McIlroy
writes in his article "A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from
the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986":

  MAIL (v1 page 21, v7 page 22)
    Electronic mail was there from the start. Never satisfied with its
    exact behavior, everybody touched it at one time or another: to
    assure the safety of simultaneous access, to improve privacy, to
    survive crashes, to exploit uucp, to screen out foreign freeloaders,
    or whatever. Not until v7 did the interface change (Thompson). [.]

We have a web page[1] which includes the online manual of the latest
release, which can be downloaded via[2].
There are git(1) repositories at sdaoden.eu[3] (use [4] for cloning
purposes), with mirrors at Sourceforge[5] and GitLab.com[6].

  [1] https?://www.sdaoden.eu/code.html#s-nail
  [2] https?://www.sdaoden.eu/downloads/s-nail-latest.tar.{asc,gz,xz}
  [3] https?://git.sdaoden.eu/cgit/s-nail.git
  [4] https?://git.sdaoden.eu/scm/s-nail.git
  [5] http://sourceforge.net/projects/s-nail
  [6] https://gitlab.com/sdaoden/s-nail

And a mailing list[7] (later: [8]!) with moderated unsubscribed posting
possibilities; subscriptions can be managed via web interface[9];
GMANE.org added the ML their archive[10] -- thank you!
Commits to the [master] branch will be posted to [11], and announcements
will also be posted to [12], both are receive-only mailing-lists.
These and all other mailings-lists at sdaoden.eu are hosted by MLMMJ, so
users can manage their subscriptions by appending keywords to the plain
mailing list address, a +subscribe for subscription, and +unsubscribe
for unsubscription, e.g., s-mailx+subscribe@sdaoden.eu.

  [7] s-nail-users@lists.sourceforge.net
  [8] s-mailx@sdaoden.eu
  [9] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/s-nail-users/
  [10] news.gmane.org/gmane.mail.s-nail.user
  [11] s-mailx-commit@sdaoden.eu
  [12] s-announce@sdaoden.eu

The S-nail(1) git(1) repository consists of five branches:

- master: rooted on top of [heirloom], this adapts Heirloom mailx(1) as
  S-nail(1).  This is the stable branch that a normal user should track.
  It is updated once a release is made, and will otherwise only see
  cherry-picked bug fixes or stable improvements.

- next: rooted on top of [master], this consists of a furious mixture of
  commits that eventually end up in [master]; it is a snapshot of the
  [crawl] branch, taken once that seems to be quite stable.

- crawl: developer chaos (distributed horror backup - don't use!).

- timeline: an ongoing effort to collect the complete history of Mail.
  Anything from the pre-Gunnar Ritter area is taken from CSRG and other
  archives, for nail and Heirloom mailx i've used release balls, and
  since S-nail v14.8.7 this is also true again (and tagging the release
  as vVERSION.ar).

- heirloom: a full git(1) cvsimport of the Heirloom mailx(1) cvs(1)
  repository.

To clone only the [master] branch, which is what a normal user most
likely is interested in:

  $ mkdir s-nail.git
  $ cd s-nail.git
  $ git init
  $ git remote add origin -t master https://git.sdaoden.eu/scm/s-nail.git
  $ git fetch -v
  $ git checkout master
  $ make CONFIG=MAXIMAL install

The release commits and release tags are signed with an OpenPGP key.
Our heraldic animal "snailmail.jpg" has been found at [100].
Thank you!

  [100] http://cdn.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/snailmail.jpg

AUTHORS
=======

Unix mail seems to have been written mostly by Ken Thompson.

Berkeley Mail was (according to "def.h") developed by Kurt Shoens, dated
March 25, 1978.  According to the CSRG commit log authors of BSD mail in
the time span 1980-10-08 to 1995-05-01 were, in order of appearance
(commit count): Kurt Shoens (379), Kirk McKusick (50), Carl Smith (16),
Bill Bush (2), Eric Allman (6), Craig Leres (43), Sam Leffler (51),
Ralph Campbell (21), Serge Granik (28), Edward Wang (253),
Donn Seeley (1), Jay Lepreau (3), Jim Bloom (1), Anne Hughes (2),
Kevin Dunlap (34), Keith Bostic (253), Mike Karels (1), Cael Staelin (6)
and Dave Borman (17).  One commit by Charlie Root, 36 by "dist".

Official BSD Mail development ceased in 1995 according to the CSRG
(Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group) repository.  Mail has then
seen further development in open source BSD variants, noticeably by
Christos Zoulas in NetBSD.

Gunnar Ritter reused that codebase when he started developing nail in
February 2000, and incorporated numerous patches from OpenBSD, NetBSD,
RedHat and Debian.  He added MIME code, network protocol support, and
POSIX conformance improvements. In March 2006, he integrated that
program into the Heirloom project, renaming it to Heirloom mailx, the
development of which ceased in 2008.

In 2012 Steffen (Daode) Nurpmeso adopted the codebase as S-nail.
We try to end up as S-mailx.

# s-ts-mode
