Date:        Tue, 21 May 2002 19:36:00 -0500 (CDT)
    From:        Richard Rauch <rauch@rice.edu>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.33.0205211919020.656-100000@math.rice.edu>

  | I found exmh later this afternoon.  It looks nice.  I couldn't find the
  | config options for pgp/gpg, though,

You need to have PGP installed (one version or another) and configured
(keyring, and all the rest installed) when you start exmh, otherwise
exmh will hide all the PGP stuff as being inapplicable.   Exmh isn't
a PGP installer - without a PGP setup, PGP is useless, so exmh doesn't
bother you with a bunch of useless stuff.

  | and it keeps generating
  | warnings/errors about not being able to talk to the GUI (though the
  | program seems to work).

I suspect you're seeing messages about not being able to talk to the back end
(exmh is two processes, the GUI front end, and the back end which does
stuff for you).   For just reading/sending the occasional message you don't
need the back end, but to truly use ehmh effectively, you do.

The warnings will be because you have xhost "security" enabled (or not
enabled) for your X server.   The TK message passing model is a horrible
security hole in that environment, so exmh won't use it, and without a
way to communicate, the back end won't run.   You need to disable all
xhost stuff ("xhost -") and make sure you are using xauth security.
The latter is easy using xdm, then it is just a matter of (perhaps)
"xhost -" to disable any host based access).

  | It also wanted some things like rplay (it even
  | had the /usr/pkg/bin/rplay pathname, I think) which were not marked as
  | dependancies in the pkgsrc Makefile.

"wanted" is too strong I think.   exmh is an example of a package done
just right.   It will use lots of other things if they're installed,
like pfp2 pgp5 gnupg faces glimpse rplay (and more) but requires only
nmh and metamail to actually work.  So only the latter two are dependencies.
If you want the others (if you insist on having noises played when you do
mail related things, etc...) install them, and enable them in exmh.

  | Still, it looks nice.  A bit slow, but cute.

It shouldn't be slow, though it will be better once the exmh people
make a release out of the code that is in their cvs repository - a few
things that are slow have been cleaned up).

But xmh / exmh style interface, with nmh running to do all the real work,
and a file per message, is always going to be slower that some other mail
interfaces (just running scan to get the TOC display can take a long time
in a large mail folder - which is why it gets cached of course).  It is
also lots more flexible, and powerful.

kre