Welcome to nail, a mail user agent!

Nail is derived from Berkeley Mail 8.1. Its concept is to include the
essential features a modern MUA must provide but to remain compatible
with its classic ancestor. Especially, nail has the ability to send and
receive MIME messages.

To compile nail, look at the file "INSTALL" that contains the generic
instructions for autoconf builds.

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 defaults still have
the compatibility values of fifteen years ago.  For batch usage, it may
be more convenient to pass the configuration as environment variables
only, as e.g. "from=user@host nail -n" does.

If you want to use nail with a POP or IMAP mailbox, you have to set up
a program like e.g. fetchmail since nail does not contain such network
client code.

Nail has been built successfully on the following systems:

Linux 		2.[024]; glibc 2.[12], libc[45]
Solaris		8; 7; 2.6; 2.5
Open UNIX	8.0.0
UnixWare	7.[01].1; 2.1.2; 2.1
OpenServer	5.0.5
Digital Unix	4.0
HP-UX		10.20
SINIX-Z		5.42
AIX		4.3.3.0
FreeBSD		4.0-STABLE
OpenBSD		2.[89]
NetBSD		1.5

If you can build it on other operating systems, please contact me and
send me a diff with your changes so I can include them in this
archive.  If there are no changes, even better, but I would like to
hear from you even then to extend this list.

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.

Note that 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, nail will not be able to read your mailbox there.

New nail versions will be announced on <http://appwatch.com> and on
<http://freshmeat.net>. Nail's home page is currently at
<http://omnibus.ruf.uni-freiburg.de/~gritter/>. If the version you have
is older than a few months, please look for a new one before reporting
bugs.

If you detect a bug and cannot fix it yourselves, please send me the
unaltered mail message that caused the problem along with a
description!  This may be a privacy issue, but it is nearly impossible
to fix the error without an exact reconstruction.

If you have an idea how to improve nail, you are also invited to write
me. But you should remember that nail's primary goal is to remain clean
and simple. All ideas are worth at least a discussion, though.

Enjoy!

Gunnar Ritter
Freiburg i. Br.
Germany
<g-r@bigfoot.de>					11/12/01
