Mail: a question and an unrelated answer

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Hi, y'all.

Question:  what mail user agents are you all using?  I see a lot of
Pine; I'm not really interested in using Pine since I'm not willing to
give up mule as my editor---I've thoroughly customized both the
reply/quoting and folder directing functions to where I rarely need to
do anything but accept defaults.

I'm currently using mule + RMail, with standard Babyl format mail
files.  However, my mail archives are just getting too cumbersome, and
I'd like to go to a folder = directory (one file per message), rather
than Babyl's folder = file (containing all messages) style.  (I might
actually be happiest with a system that named message files by their
message-IDs.)

Has anybody used mule+mh?  xmh?  Other suggestions?

:-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-)
As for the answer, a couple of folks have been driving me nuts because 
their mail addresses are machines which do not accept mail.  Eg, one
correspondent lives at yahoo.com.  'host' will tell you that

yahoo.com has address 205.216.146.90
yahoo.com mail is handled by mailhost.yahoo.com

and *only* by mailhost.yahoo.com.

mailhost.yahoo.com has address 205.216.162.34

which is not the ame thing....  Smail in its default linux
configuration isn't smart enough to handle this situation; it just
keeps pounding away at the SMTP port on yahoo.com.  It turns out that
you need to add the following

# For internet use: uncomment the below 4 lines
        use_bind,                       # resolve MX and multiple A records
        defnames,                       # use standard domain searching
        defer_no_connect,               # try again if the nameserver is down
        -local_mx_okay,                 # fail an MX to the local host

to all the Internet/SMTP transports.

Now that this is resolved, I see no reason to use sendmail, with its
famously recondite rewrite rules for address resolution.

Steve