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<a name="Introduction-1"></a>
<h2 class="chapter">1 Introduction</h2>
<p>GNU Mailutils is a set of libraries and utilities for handling
electronic mail. It addresses a wide audience and can be of interest
to application developers, casual users and system administrators alike.
</p>
<p>It provides programmers with a consistent API allowing them to
handle a variety of different mailbox formats transparently and
without having to delve into complexities of their internal structure.
While doing so, it also provides interfaces that simplify common
programming tasks, such as handling lists, parsing configuration
files, etc. The philosophy of Mailutils is to have a single and
consistent programming interface for various objects designed to
handle the same task. It tries to use their similarities to create an
interface that hides their differences and complexities. This covers
a wide variety of programming tasks: apart from mailbox handling,
Mailutils also contains a unified iterface for work with various DBM
databases and much more.
</p>
<p>The utilities built upon these libraries share that same distinctive
feature: no matter what is the internal structure of an object, it is
always handled the same way as other objects that do the same task.
Again, the most common example of this approach are, of course,
mailboxes. Whatever Mailutils program you use, you can be sure it is
able to handle various mailbox formats. You even don’t have to inform
it about what type a mailbox is: it will do its best to discover it
automatically.
</p>
<p>This approach sometimes covers entities which are seldom regarded as
compatible. For example, using Mailutils it is possible to treat an SMTP
connection as a mailbox opened only for appending new messages. This
in turn, provides a way for extending the functionality of some
utilities. As an example, using this concept of mailboxes, the usual
mail delivery agent becomes able to do things usually reserved for
mail transport agents only!
</p>
<p>At the core of Mailutils is <samp>libmailutils</samp>, a library which
provides an API for accessing a generalized mailbox. A set of
complementary libraries provide methods for handling particular
mailbox implementations: UNIX mailbox, Maildir, MH, POP3, IMAP4,
even SMTP. Mailutils offers functions for almost any mail-related
task, such as parsing of messages, email addresses and URLs, handling
MIME messages, listing mail folders, mailcap facilities, extensible
Sieve filtering, access control lists. It supports various modern
data security and authentication techniques: TLS encryption, SASL and
GSSAPI, to name a few. Mailutils is able to work with a wide
variety of authorization databases, ranging from traditional system
password database up to RADIUS, SQL and LDAP.
</p>
<p>The utilities provided by Mailutils include <code>imap4d</code> and
<code>pop3d</code> mail servers, mail reporting utility
<code>comsatd</code>, general-purpose mail delivery agent
<code>maidag</code>, mail filtering program <code>sieve</code>, an implementation
of MH message handling system and much more.
</p>
<p>All utilities share the same subset of command line options and use
a unified configuration mechanism, which allows to easily configure
the package as a whole.
</p>
<p>This software is part of the GNU Project and is copyrighted by the
Free Software Foundation. All libraries are distributed under the
terms of the Lesser GNU Public License. The documentation is licensed
under the GNU FDL, and everything else is licensed under the GNU GPL.
</p>
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<tr><td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="History.html#History" accesskey="2">History</a>:</td><td> </td><td align="left" valign="top">A bit of History
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