mh-e: From Stephen Gildea
D.3 From Stephen Gildea
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In 1987 I went to work for Bolt Beranek and Newman, as Jim had before
me. In my previous job, I had been using RMAIL, but as my folders tend
to run large, I was frustrated with the speed of RMAIL. However, I
stuck with it because I wanted the GNU Emacs interface. I am very
familiar and comfortable with the Emacs interface (with just a few
modifications of my own) and dislike having to use applications with
embedded editors; they never live up to Emacs.
MH is the mail reader of choice at BBN, so I converted to it. Since
I didn’t want to give up using an Emacs interface, I started using MH-E.
As is my wont, I started hacking on it almost immediately. I first used
version 3.4m. One of the first features I added was to treat the folder
buffer as a file-visiting buffer: you could lock it, save it, and be
warned of unsaved changes when killing it. I also worked to bring its
functionality a little closer to RMAIL. Jim Larus was very cooperative
about merging in my changes, and my efforts first appeared in version
3.6, distributed with Emacs 18.52 in 1988. Next I decided MH-E was too
slow and optimized it a lot. Version, 3.7, distributed with Emacs 18.56
in 1990, was noticeably faster.
When I moved to the X Consortium I became the first person there to
not use xmh. (There is now one other engineer there using MH-E.) About
this point I took over maintenance of MH-E from Jim and was finally able
to add some features Jim hadn’t accepted, such as the backward searching
undo. My first release was 3.8 (Emacs 18.58) in 1992.
Now, in 1994, we see a flurry of releases, with both 4.0 and 5.0.
Version 4.0 added many new features, including background folder
collection and support for composing MIME messages. (Reading MIME
messages remains to be done, alas.) While writing this book, Bill
Wohler gave MH-E its closest examination ever, uncovering bugs and
inconsistencies that required a new major version to fix, and so version
5 was released.
Stephen Gildea, June 1994
Info Catalog
mh-e: From Jim Larus
mh-e: History
mh-e: From Bill Wohler