Welcome to nail, a mail user agent for Unix systems!

Nail is derived from Berkeley Mail and is intended provide the
functionality of the POSIX mailx command with additional support
for MIME, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and S/MIME. It provides enhanced
features for interactive use, such as caching and disconnected
operation for IMAP, message threading, scoring, and filtering.
It is also usable as a mail batch language, both for sending
and receiving mail.

To compile and install nail, look at the file 'INSTALL'. You can also
build nail RPMs using 'rpmbuild -tb nail-<version>.tar.bz2'.

After compilation, edit the personal and system-wide run time
configuration files to match your needs. You _really_ should do this or
at least install the template because most of the built-in defaults still
have the compatibility values of twenty-five years ago. For batch usage,
it is recommended to pass the configuration as environment variables only,
as e.g. 'env MAILRC=/dev/null from=user@host nail -n' does.

Nail has been built successfully in the following environments using
the current configuration system:

Linux           Kernel 2.0 and above; libc4, libc5, glibc 2.2 and above,
                diet libc, uClibc; gcc, Intel C
Solaris         2.6 and above; Sun C, gcc
Open UNIX       8.0.0
FreeBSD         4.9-RELEASE, 5.2.1-RELEASE
HP-UX           B.11.11, B.11.23
Tru64 UNIX      4.0G, 5.1B
NetBSD          1.6
AIX             5.1
UNICOS          9.0.2.2
EP/IX           2.2.1AA; /svr4/bin/cc

If you can build it on other systems, please contact the nail
development list (see below) and send a diff with your changes so
they can be included in the main version (preferably a unified
diff, diff -u). If there are no changes, even better, but it would
be nice to hear from you even then to extend the list above.

It should generally be possible to build nail on most Unix-style
systems without much effort; however, especially the character set
support varies between them. See the file 'I18N' for details.

On the other hand, I strongly discourage from porting nail to Windows
and environments that make Windows look Unix-like; I won't accept any
patches or suggestions that go in this direction. There are two major
reasons for this: First, any port makes maintaining harder; there are
always more work-arounds in the source, and introducing new features
involves the question whether they will work an all supported platforms.
The more different a platform behaves from, let's say, the common Unix
way, the more hacks have to be made, costing human time that could
otherwise have been used to enhance the software for Unix platforms.
Windows is just not worth this, and here we are at the second point:
Porting software to Windows encourages people to use -- that is: to buy
-- Windows. It supports a company that is known to threaten Open Source
software like nail. In short, porting nail (or similar free software)
to Windows has an ill effect on that software. Don't do it.

Note that my statement doesn't legally restrict you if you want to port
nail to any platform. This would not be the way of free software either,
especially since I might be wrong in the future; as an example, porting
free software to mainframes of a certain company is considered a good
thing today. I just wish to express my opinion as a free software
developer, and to inform you that I don't maintain such a port.

The mbox format variant based on the 'Content-Length:' header field that
is used on most SVr4 systems by default is not supported by nail. As this
format generally is a design flaw, you should fix your system by either
using procmail for local mail delivery, which is a good idea anyway, or
at least add the -E flag to the Mlocal line in /etc/sendmail.cf if using
/usr/lib/mail.local.

Although it is not bad, just obsolete, similar considerations apply
to the MMDF format used on OpenServer systems; unless you switch to
procmail (or contribute support for this format), nail will not be
able to read your mailbox there.

New nail versions will be announced on <http://freshmeat.net>; you
can use their subscription service if you wish to be notified by mail
when a new version is released. Nail's home page is located at
<http://nail.sourceforge.net>. Please always look for the newest
version before reporting bugs.

Nail development is discussed on the 'nail-devel' mailing list.
All people interested in discussing or coding features for future
releases are invited to participate. Bug reports should also be
sent to the list. To subscribe to the list or look at the archives,
visit <https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nail-devel>. If
you do not want to subscribe, you can directly mail to the list
using the address <nail-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>.

Enjoy!

Gunnar Ritter
Freiburg i. Br.
Germany
<Gunnar.Ritter@pluto.uni-freiburg.de>                           10/25/04
