Arch Linux

Description:
as per this forum thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=40579, I request considering switching the mailx package to the one offered by the heirloom project [1]. This is the successor of 'nail' which is used by many scripts (f.ex. logcheck) and, while being CLI-compatible with the 'core' UNIX mailx [2], offers much more features:

It doesn't need an smtp server running on localhost but can connect to a smarthost, even with several encryption methods (SMTPS, SMTP+TLS, IMAP etc.). It also provides a basic MUA (which UNIX mailx does as well), offering IMAP and POP(s) protocols and maildir storage. It supports UTF-8 and MIME mails and offers a CLI switch to attach a file to the mail (which very annoyingly current core mailx doesn't.)

Admittedly tho, it is a bigger package than the other mailx.

There's a short history of those packages at [3], and AFAIU, core mailx presently is System V mailx (which is open source only since opensolaris release in 2005 -- debian changelog reveals upstream changes get sourced in from OpenBSD tree [4]), a derivative of Berkeley Mail. While POSIX.2 was defined around mailx and not Berkeley Mail and heirloom mailx is an independent derivative of the latter, both versions of mailx now comply with POSIX.2 and Single Unix Specification, Version 3. Depending on how it is launched, heirloom also provides a Mail interface. Due to the fact that linux distributions couldn't use System V mailx until 2005, they often have had to resort to Berkeley Mail only with both 'mail' and 'mailx' calling 'Mail'. I am not sure when development of heirloom 'mailx', then under the name of 'nail' started, but since it aimed at providing strict POSIX.2 compliance and many of the additional features mentioned above that was an attractive option to replace 'Mail', so many distributions had 'mail'/'mailx' call nail then.
In 2006 nail was renamed heirloom mailx and recently distributions began to adjust to that. Others keep it as nail however.

AFAICT, OpenSUSE now uses heirloom mailx (under the name of mailx) by default [5]; Mandriva installs nail by default [6]; Fedora provides nail with their extra repository [7]; BeyondLFS uses mailx, symlinked to by 'mail' and 'nail' as well [8]; debian finally has GNU mailtools [9] (which provide yet another 'mail' supposed to replace mail/mailx [10], but provides UNIX mailx [11] and nail [12] as well -- I didn't understand which one of those was how much of a default, tho...



[1] http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html
[2] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/mailx.html
[3] http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx_history.html
[4] http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/m/mailx/mailx_8.1.2-0.20071017cvs-2/changelog
[5] http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/SuSE/2007-01/msg03256.html
[6] http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2006/Notes#Nail_instead_of_mailx
[7] http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=143690
[8] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/basicnet/mailx.html
[9] http://packages.debian.org/sid/mailutils
[10] http://www.gnu.org/software/mailutils/
[11] http://packages.debian.org/sid/mailx
[12] http://packages.debian.org/sid/nail