User Agents

# User Agents for Internet Mail

If you are a novice Internet user in a UNIX computer I recommend you to try the program Pine which has extensive internal help and many other features designed for novice users. If you're not a novice we do have other programs like Elm (fairly easy) and Rand Mh (Unix fans only). If you know the Emacs editor you'll find few more inside it like RMAIL and mh-e. There's also support some MIME features like attachments and ISO Latin-1 character sets in some of them like Pine, Metamail or Mixmh.

For those who have their personal MSDOS or Macintosh directly connected to the Internet there exists many user interfaces that can access the post office computer with IMAP or POP protocols. Most of them require some local configuration and disk space for archives. The easiest alternative that works for everyone is to just use the microcomputer as a terminal to a Unix or other multiuser computer where basic things like your electronic mail address or backups of your mail archives are taken care by the management. With a good terminal emulator like KERMIT you can easily take care of character translation problems too.

For MS-DOS I'd recommend PINE with new IMAP support including management of remote folders or for Windows perhaps Eudora which supports only POP. For Macintosh you could look in to Maelstrom which has IMAP support or Eudora which has become a quite popular POP client. There's a plenty of others to choose from in ftp archives like ftp.funet.fi or in the software stores. Many commercial TCP/IP software implementations seem to have at least some kind of POP agent included and there's even some sold separately like STI Document Browser or Zmail. This is not an endorsement of any particular commercial product, but just some examples to check on.

If you don't have a Unix computer and are not even willing to set up a free one using PC hardware like Linux or BSD 4.3 but have a prorietary microcomputer LAN protocol like Novell, LAN Manager or AppleTalk already in use there's still many possibilities for you. In case you have a NOVELL network you might want to check Pegasus mail user agent with Mercury or Charon as post offices for them. With PC and Macintosh LAN software there's also many proprietary electronic mail packages like ICL Data Office Team, Lotus CC:Mail, Word Perfect Office, MS Mail, Retix X.400 etc. which have Internet and X.400 gateways as an option. Remember that you should check before buying that you get all the features that you need like DNS MX record support or various MIME features. At least you should check that you get adequate support for the national character sets you need.

This is the last chapter in this guide so far.

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