Announcing VM Mail Reader, version 8.1.1

Announcing VM Mail Reader, version 8.1.1

[Uday S Reddy]

The VM Mail Reader version 8.1.1 has been released and is available for download from its Savannah home:

   https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/viewmail

For people that might not have heard of VM before, VM is one of the oldest mail readers developed for Emacs.  Created by Kyle Jones starting in 1989, it is the main mail reader in XEmacs.  It supports the old RMAIL mail format of Gnu Emacs, as well as the Unix mbox formats used by Thunderbird and other mail clients.  So, it is quite normal and convenient to switch back and forth between VM and other mail clients.

Kyle's involvement with VM tapered off around 2003 and VM got handed over to the user community for maintenance.  Robert Widhopf-Fenk was in charge of it till around 2008, and Ulrich Mueller and I joined the team in late 2009.

The 8.1.x series of VM incorporates about 2 years worth of development, possibly even more.  The main new features include full support for IMAP servers, integration with Emacs/W3M for reading HTML email, inter-operation with Thunderbird, and clean support for international character sets (which took quite some time to get right).  Active development of VM continues.

VM is not included in Gnu Emacs distribution due to copyright issues, but it is included in XEmacs, Debian, Fedora and FreeBSD distributions.  However, these distributions would be a couple of versions behind.  Go to the VM home page for the latest stable releases.

Cheers,
Uday Reddy
(VM Development Team)