mail is a
command-line email client for
Unix and
Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s.
History
"Electronic mail was there from the start",
Douglas McIlroy writes in his article "A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986",
and so a command was included in the first released version of research Unix,
First Edition Unix.
This version of mail was capable to send (append) messages to the mailboxes of other users on the Unix system, and it helped managing (reading) the mailbox of the current user.
In 1978 Kurt Shoens wrote a completely new version of mail for
BSD2, referred to as Berkeley Mail. Although initially installed at , (with the earlier Unix mail still available at ), on most modern Unix and
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
systems the commands , and/or all invoke a descendant of this Berkeley Mail, which much later was the base for the standardization of a mail program by the
OpenGroup, the
POSIX
The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...
standardized variant
mailx.
"mail, Mail, mailx, nail—history notes"
Heirloom Project
See also
* Cleancode email
* mailx
References
External links
at GNU Mailutils manual
Unix Internet software
{{Unix-stub