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What is a MUA?
MUA stands for Mail User Agent. MUAs present
previously received mail messages to users, help them
to store and archive the latter and compose and spool new
messages for further delivery. Usually MUAs do not
transfer the mail data to remote hosts themselves, but leave
this part of the job to MTAs (Mail Transfer
Agents). However, more and more MUAs nowadays also offer
the option to directly send mail using SMTP.
Console based MUAs
- mail was the first "tool" being available on Unix
systems to read and write mail. It uses the terminal console
for text editing which, of course, is not too comfortable,
because it restricts editing to single lines - just the same
as within command lines.
- Sendmail,
as well as the compatibility modes of its successors, offer
reading from stdin. This allow users to send mail messages
by directly calling sendmail.
Terminal based MUAs
- elm
- pine
- mutt
All of these MUAs make use of the capabilities of the
terminal. Users can use their favourite text editor for compositing
mails, attach additional files, manage folders, call external
programs like text encoders and decoders, aso. Because the
output is terminal based tools like these can be used for
working on remote hosts as comfortable as working on local
machines.
X-based MUAs
- xmh was the first MUA for the
X Window System.
Its graphic output is based on the Athena X-Toolkit allowing
it to make use of this toolkit's widgets and text editing
facilities. xmh introduced the xmh mail folder format,
which was necessary to maintain several mail folders at once.
- kmail represents the state-of-the-art MUA for the KDE
Desktop Environment. The latest versions of kmail support direct
SMTP-delivery, POP and IMAP and several user identities.
- balsa
spruce
althea
These three programs represent the
GTK-counterpart
to the Qt-based kmail, with balsa being the most featured.
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