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

S-nail 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 and offers (mostly optional)
extensions for line editing, IDNA, MIME, S/MIME, SMTP and POP3 (and IMAP).
It is usable as a mail batch language.
S-nail is a derivative of Heirloom mailx, formerly known as nail, which
itself is based upon Berkeley Mail that has a history back to the 70s.

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 S-nail and deserve
acknowledgement.

S-nail has git(1) repositories at Sourceforge[1] (browsable[2]) and
GitLab.com[3] (browsable[4]), and regulary produces release tarballs[5],
which can also be addressed directly[6] (e.g., via "curl -v -L").
There is also something visual on the web that includes the latest
version of the manual online[7].
And we have a mailing list[8] with moderated unsubscribed posting
possibilities; subscriptions can be managed via web interface[9];
GMANE.org added s-nail-users@ to their archive[10] -- thank you!

  [1] git.code.sf.net/p/s-nail/code (HTTP / GIT)
  [2] http://sourceforge.net/p/s-nail/code/
  [3] https://gitlab.com/sdaoden/s-nail.git
  [4] https://gitlab.com/sdaoden/s-nail
  [5] https://sourceforge.net/projects/s-nail/files/?source=navbar
  [6] https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/s-nail/s-nail-VERSION.tar.xz
  [7] http://sdaoden.users.sourceforge.net/code.html#s-nail
  [8] mailto:s-nail-users@lists.sourceforge.net
  [9] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/s-nail-users/
  [10] news://news.gmane.org/gmane.mail.s-nail.user

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 bugfixes or very 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, nothing for normal people.

- timeline: an ongoing effort to collect the complete history of Mail.

- 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 git://git.code.sf.net/p/s-nail/code
alternatively
  $ git remote add origin -t master https://gitlab.com/s-nail/s-nail.git
  $ git fetch -v
  $ git checkout master
  $ make CONFIG=MAXIMAL install

The S-nail(1) heraldic animal "snailmail.jpg" has been found at
<http://cdn.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/snailmail.jpg>.
Thank you!

AUTHORS
=======

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 spam 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".

After the 4.4BSD release in 1993, Mail was not further developed
officially.  The code that Heirloom mailx is based on contains
numerous patches from OpenBSD, NetBSD, RedHat and Debian. Namely
the NetBSD developer Christos Zoulas wrote much of it.

The maintainer and primary developer of Heirloom mailx is
Gunnar Ritter. Its development started under the name "nail" in
February 2000 and added especially the MIME code, network protocol
support, and POSIX conformance improvements. In March 2006, the
program has been integrated into the Heirloom project.

In 2012 the stale Heirloom mailx(1) was adapted as S-nail(1) by
Steffen (Daode) Nurpmeso.

# s-ts-mode
