You might be wondering what posessed me to write a mail client from scratch when ELM and PINE and MH already exist. . . A little history lesson first. I was a hardcore MUSH (Mail User's SHell) user for many years, but gave up on it when it became a commercial product called Z-Mail (I like to use ``supported'' software, by which I mean that work is still being done on it).
After that I started using ELM, and I found that I really liked the interface. However, it lacked many features, such as PGP and MIME support. I looked at PINE, but I ditched it because I felt it was too oriented toward complete newbies, and I found it ackward and not very configurable. So I went to work hacking on ELM and started out the patches that have since been dubbed the ``ELM-ME'' patches.
While this was going on, work was getting underway in the ELM development group for ELM-2.5alpha. Simply put, the ELM developers were not interested in what I was doing, and I became frustrated by this because it was obvious from reading comp.mail.elm that many people liked what I was doing. And since ELM is really poorly coded in a lot of places, I decided that I would try my hand at writing my own mail client from scratch.
Mutt originally started out as an ELM clone (and to a large extent, Mutt still is very ELM-like), but I began thinking of features (especially from MUSH) that I really liked and missed. Also, there are many parts of ELM that I was not particulary fond of, or felt could have been done better. As a result, Mutt has ended up having very much a personality of its own while remaining easy for ELM users to switch over.
When I first started writing Mutt, I had not really intended for it to become as popular as it has. I wanted a mail client that I liked and didn't really care about anything else. But I've found that quite a few people share my impeccable taste. :-)
Kari Hurrta <kari.hurtta@fmi.fi> co-developed the original MIME parsing code back in the ELM-ME days.
Thomas ``Mike'' Michlmayr <mike@cosy.sbg.ac.at> designed the keybinding mechanism.
Ken Weinert <kenw@ihs.com> wrote the random signature support.
The following people have been helpful to the development of Mutt:
Francois Berjon
<Francois.Berjon@aar.alcatel-alsthom.fr>,
Aric Blumer
<aric@fore.com>,
John Capo
<jc@irbs.com>,
David DeSimone
<fox@convex.hp.com>,
Nickolay N. Dudorov
<nnd@wint.itfs.nsk.su>,
Michael Finken
<finken@conware.de>,
Sven Guckes
<guckes@math.fu-berlin.de>,
Mark Holloman
<holloman@nando.net>,
Andreas Holzmann
<holzmann@fmi.uni-passau.de>,
David Jeske
<jeske@igcom.net>,
Christophe Kalt
<kalt@hugo.int-evry.fr>,
Felix von Leitner (a.k.a ``Fefe'')
<leitner@math.fu-berlin.de>,
Brandon Long
<blong@uiuc.edu>,
Lars Marowsky-Bree
<lmb@pointer.in-minden.de>,
David O'Brien
<obrien@Nuxi.cs.ucdavis.edu>,
Clint Olsen
<olsenc@ichips.intel.com>,
Park Myeong Seok
<pms@romance.kaist.ac.kr>,
Thomas Parmelan
<tom@ankh.fr.eu.org>,
Ollivier Robert
<roberto@keltia.freenix.fr>,
Allain Thivillon
<Allain.Thivillon@alma.fr>
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