MH Message Handling System

MH is a software for reading and composing e -mails, which consists of several programs for one function and manages each email as a separate file.

MH was developed in the 1970s at the RAND Corporation. Around 1977 formulated R. Stockton Gaines and Norman Z. Shapiro the basics of the concept. It was created in late 1978 by Bruce S. Borden. The software is called MH because Borden could think of no other name than the abbreviation of mail handler.

The precursor of MH was MS. MS the RAND Corporation had developed in the order. But employees were dissatisfied with this monolithic software because it was slow and difficult to understand.

Began in 1982 under the direction of Marshall Rose a five-year metamorphosis of MH at the University of California, Irvine. The University was responsible for the software until 2006. Large contributions to MH has inter alia, the University of California, Berkeley. MH has also been ported from Unix to MS -DOS.

MH is now public domain and may therefore be incorporated into other software, without even being called. A further development is done nmh under the name, which stands for new MH. Another implementation is included in the Mailutils of GNU, with which, for example, MH -E realizes the integration into Emacs. Sylpheed and Claws Mail put on the storage format of MH. Mutt supports the storage format of mbox and Maildir in addition to MH.

The storage format of MH allows for structuring contained subfolders to any depth, nestable and groups files.