NoCarrierMail

NoCarrierMail is an offline mail packet reader with a curses-based interface, for Unix / Linux, macOS, Windows, and other systems. It reads and replies to messages in the Blue Wave, QWK, OMEN, SOUP, and OPX formats.

NoCarrierMail is a fork of MultiMail, maintained by andy5995. MultiMail was written by Kolossvary Tamas and Toth Istvan and maintained for many years by William McBrine; see Credits. This fork adds a Meson build, a unit-test suite, and a number of fixes and features on top of the 0.52 base.

NoCarrierMail is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later.

Downloads, help, and where to take part:

• Source code -- the project on GitHub
• Latest release -- prebuilt binaries for the newest version
• Snapshot builds -- built from the latest code, for testing
• Discussions -- questions and general talk
• Issue tracker -- bugs and feature requests

Features

Additions in this fork (see HISTORY.md for the full list):

• Meson build system for Unix/Linux, macOS, and Windows (MSYS2 with ncurses, MSVC with PDCurses), with per-platform CI.
• Full-length QWK headers via Synchronet's HEADERS.DAT -- both read (To/From/Subject beyond the 25-character MESSAGES.DAT limit) and written back into reply packets.
• Message voting via Synchronet's VOTING.DAT -- see each message's up/down vote count, read polls and their results as messages, and cast your own vote with W.
• UTF-8 terminals are drawn through the wide curses API, so the IBM line and block characters in ANSI art and message text appear as themselves instead of as raw bytes.
• Configurable date format in the reading view (the DateFormat keyword, a strftime string; defaults to your locale).
• External viewer -- the L key opens the current message in a pager or editor of your choice (the Viewer keyword), so links can be clicked and text selected.
• A unit-test suite (meson test), also run under AddressSanitizer/UBSan, plus several memory-safety fixes.

Building

You'll need a C++ compiler, Meson, Ninja, and a curses library (ncurses, SysV curses, or PDCurses 3.1+, 3.6+ recommended). From the top of the source tree:

meson setup builddir
meson compile -C builddir

The binary is builddir/ncmail. To run the tests:

meson test -C builddir

To install under the prefix (default /usr/local):

meson install -C builddir

See INSTALL.md for build options, the 16-bit DOS/OS2 makefiles, and PDCurses/XCurses notes. At run time you'll also need an archiver such as InfoZip to unpack packets and pack replies.

Installing with Homebrew

This repository is also a Homebrew tap:

brew tap andy5995/nocarriermail https://github.com/andy5995/NoCarrierMail
brew trust andy5995/nocarriermail
brew install ncmail

Homebrew does not load formulas from a third-party tap until you mark the tap as trusted. That is what the brew trust line does. Without it, the install stops with an "untrusted tap" error.

Homebrew builds NoCarrierMail from source. See HomebrewFormula/README.md for the details of the formula.

Prebuilt binary for Apple Silicon

Each release also has a ready-made tarball for Apple Silicon Macs. Download it from the releases page and unpack it. This does not need Homebrew.

macOS marks files downloaded with a web browser as quarantined. The first run may be blocked with a message about an unidentified developer. Remove the mark to run it:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ncmail

Usage

See the man page for usage, and edit ~/.ncmailrc (or ncmail.rc on Windows) to configure the reader. Example color schemes are in the colors directory; select one with the ColorFile keyword.

If you used MultiMail before, you can keep your old settings. Copy your ~/.mmailrc file to ~/.ncmailrc (on Windows, copy mmail.rc to ncmail.rc). New users do not need to do this.

Contributing

Bug reports, suggestions, and pull requests are welcome. See the links at the top of this file.

Credits

MultiMail was originally developed under Linux by Kolossvary Tamas and Toth Istvan. John Zero maintained versions 0.2 through 0.6; from version 0.7, William McBrine was the maintainer, and his releases are the basis for this fork.

Additional code has been contributed by Peter Krefting, Mark D. Rejhon, Ingo Brueckl, Robert Vukovic, and Frederic Cambus. The QWK HEADERS.DAT work in this fork was done with input from Rob Swindell (Synchronet).

Earlier bug reports and suggestions are noted in the HISTORY.md file.