Chapter Introduction (Preface)

[next] [table of contents] [index]

The MH Message Handling System is a set of electronic mail programs in the public domain. If your computer runs UNIX, it can probably run MH. MH is free, powerful, flexible -- and the basics are easy to learn. This book starts with an introduction to electronic mail; if you've never used email, that's a good place to start. If you'll be using MIME multimedia email, read the introductory MIME chapter. Next is an overview and tour of MH 6.8.3. You can start sending and reading mail with MH right away, by following the examples and step by step instructions in the tour. In just a few pages, you'll have the flavor of the system and a hint of the advanced features. After the tour, a series of chapters give detailed information about using and customizing MH.

This book also covers three popular interfaces, or front ends, to MH. There's a step-by-step tour for each interface that will have you sending and reading mail within a few pages.

Other chapters build on these tours to show you more features and help you customize the programs if you want to. One Chapter explains how to program with MH -- to get the most out of it, you should have done some computer programming. There are useful programming examples sprinkled through the book. A Section explains the programs in this book's online archive file. But even if you've never programmed, you should be able to get most of these programs running with just a little help from a friend.

[Table of Contents] [Index] [Next: Why Choose MH?]


Last change $Date: 1996/06/06 15:08:57 $

This file is from the third edition of the book MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, ISBN 1-56592-093-7, by Jerry Peek. Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. This file is freely-available; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For more information, see the file copying.htm.

Suggestions are welcome: Jerry Peek <jpeek@jpeek.com>