newmail

History of newmail

newmail occurred first inside the Elm mail reader and proved to be quite useful to console-oriented people. Over the years it has been improved and integrated fully into the Elm package.

In 2000 Joey has extracted this tool from the Elm mailer suite and started its own package for easier maintenance. Another reason was the removal of elm from the Debian distribution which would have left Joey without newmail.

Unfortunately the code hasn't been improved so much that it did understand encoded subject and from lines. The codebase of Elm also proved to be quite awkward (due to its age and history) and the license was not exactly a Free Software license.

Hence, in 2004 the utility was rewritten from scratch and released using the GNU General Public License to preserve its freedom. Further improvements have added the functionality to deal with encoded subject and from lines.