COLUMBIA MM VERSSION 0.91

  Sat Oct  5 13:49:26 2002

Columbia MM is a reincarnation of the DECSYSTEM-20 MM (Mail Manager) program.
The original was written in PDP-10 assembler by Stuart McLure Cracraft, Mike
McMahon, and Mark Crispin (among others) in the late 1970s to mid 1980s.
Columbia MM was written at Columbia University in C for Unix but with an eye
to portability.  In times past, it was built on lots of Unix platforms as well
as on non-Unix platforms including DOS and possibly VMS.  The original work
was done as part of the Hermit Project under a grant from Digital Equipment
Corporation, 1984-87.  The programmers were Chris Maio, Andy Lowry, Melissa
Metz, Fuat Baran, Howie Kaye; others may have included Delores Ng, Bill
Catchings, Bill Schilit, maybe even me, who remembers.  The principal
investigator for the DEC grant was Frank da Cruz (me).  More about Hermit
here:

  http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hermit.html

Work on MM by approximately the same crew continued after Hermit was
terminated because it had become Columbia's primary email client.  Version
0.90 (1990) added various user-friendliness features designed by a committee
of bigwigs ("novice" mode, ?-help categorized by topic, etc), and saw heavy
service for some years but was gradually overtaken by Pine, and then later
by PC- and Web-based mail.  Y2K and Y2K1 patches were added in 1999-2001.
MM is now used mainly by touch-typing menu-hating die-hards (like me), for
reasons such as those elaborated here:

  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/safe.html

Columbia MM 0.91 (September 2002) incorporates all patches to 0.90, fixes
some other problems, and adds a couple new features (downloading, handling
of 8-bit message text).  It is distributed together with Columbia CCMD (a
TOPS-20 COMND JSYS simulator, also a Hermit Project product), upon which MM
depends.  Both are in source-code form, and must be built from source.  The
distribution consists of the following files:

  mm-ccmd-0.91.tar (also available in .Z and .gz format) - Source code.

Several binaries are collected in the binaries subdirectory of this
directory with names like:

  mm-0.91-hardware-os-osversion

for example:

  binaries/mm-0.91-i386-linux-rh7.1

for Red Hat Linux 7.1 on the PC.

Other files are docs from 0.90 not included in the tar archive:

  mm-in-2-pages.hqx       MacWrite II format 2-page quick reference.
  mm-in-2-pages.txt       Plain text file version of above, not
			  quite in two pages, and crudely formatted.
  mm-intro.txt            Introductory document to MM.
  mm-manual-mss.tar.Z     Scribe sources to MM manual (mm-manual.ps)
			  (Only grab this if you have Scribe).
  mm-manual-palatino.ps.Z Postscript format MM manual (Palatino font).
  mm-manual-times.ps.Z    Postscript format MM manual (TimesRoman).
  mm-manual.txt.Z         Text file format of MM manual (with some
                          amount of lossage where figures did not
                          format correctly due to line length).
  release-0.91.txt        Latest release notes.

When unpacked, the mm-0.91.tar archive yields a directory tree containing:

work:
  README.TXT        (file)       This file
  release-0.91.txt  (file)       Version 0.91 user documentation
  release-0.xx.txt  (file)       User documentation for 0.90, 0.88, etc.
  notes-fdc.txt     (file)       Edit history of my changes
  notes-klh.txt     (file)       Edit history of Ken Harrenstein's changes
  ccmd              (directory)  CCMD source code, makefile, etc.
  mm                (directory)  MM source code, makefile, etc.
  mm/sysh           (directory)  System-dependent header files for MM.
  mm/help           (directory)  Tree of help-text files.
  mm/INSTALL        (file)       Installation instructions.

To build MM, first cd to ccmd and type "make xxx", where xxx is "solaris",
"linux" or other platform name (see the Makefile for possibilities).

Then cd to the mm directory and type "make xxx" (see the Makefile for xxx's).
This should produce an "mm" executable, ready to run, and a "movemail"
executable, which should be installed in (or linked to from)
/usr/local/lib/mm/.  See the mm/INSTALL file for details.

Builds known to work in version 0.91:
  Solaris (2.5.1 and later); SunOS 4.1; Linux (e.g. RH7.1); FreeBSD 4.4;
  OpenBSD 3.0, NetBSD 1.5.2.

Builds known not to work in version 0.91:
  HP-UX 10.20

The rest are unknown.  If you can verify a working build or fix a
nonworking build, please let us know via email to:

  bug-mm@columbia.edu

(End)
------------------------
Thu Oct  9 16:55:34 2003

This edit contains a Solaris-specific fix for the "creeping date" problem
in mbox-format mail files.  The symptom was the message envelope dates
(which are used internally by MM for all date-related queries, etc) would
drift backwards in time every time you read in and wrote out your mail file,
because the envelope ("From " line) timestamp would be read in as local
time, but written out as GMT (UTC) due to #ifdefs in one of the time
conversion routines not selecting the needed timezone code.

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