On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 9:59 PM Tim Lee <progscriptclone@gmail.com> wrote:
I assume you want to keep the email from each account separate?
Yes, that is correct.
I've been an MH user going on 33yrs.
I'm curious: what did people commonly use for reading mail when MH was
just invented? Was it the Unix "mail" program?
mail for most folks. A few used emacs to do the job (mostly programmers
given the vertical cliff learning curve for emacs).
By the time the early 90s rolled around (I think I switched to mh back
around 93, perhaps 92), xmh, mailtool (in the SunOS world, anyway), pine,
and mutt.
Those were what I was seeing in academia, anyway. [Mostly a Sun shop, but
we had samples of most of the commercial UNIXes or UNIXish around at the
time- DEC, NEXT, HP, AIX, whatever IBM had before AIX.]
Using different UNIX accounts ensures 100% separation. You can do
everything under one ID in theory, but you'll spend a lot of
effort/time
switching email IDs via different profiles. My opinion is that this
will be
error prone unless one has a lot of self discipline.
And I'll second the suggestion. It is the easiest, cleanest solution and
avoids any possible confusion where you sent a work email via a personal
account *or* sent something personal via your work email.
I understand that this ensures that the accounts stay separate, but
managing multiple user accounts is not exactly light work. I guess the
use of separate UNIX accounts may be appropriate for particular use cases,
but I do not need such a strict separation at the moment.
Having managed multiple UNIX accounts in multiple domains (plus a shared
root account), the effort is not that high for multiple accounts. If there
is a shared computer or domain, you can pretty easily share ~/bin, dot
files, and the like without much pain (did this for years). Throwing in X
applications as both users being active at the same time is a bit harder if
you wish to do so securely (no "xhost +" stuff). With a separate work and
personal environment on different hardware and domains, yeah, that is high
effort to keep up to spec. That is also the case where you probably _want_
a strong separation however.
Trying to keep my nmh stuff straight with 2+ mailboxes all ending up in one
data store and with one set of nmh configuration files is hard and is going
to set you up for regression issues (change that is needed for $work breaks
stuff for $me). It is much harder to do that with different user IDs.
At the risk of scope creep, no matter which path you pick, give thought to
using some form of version control (the archaic RCS or SCCS are up to this
job, git or subversion would presumably be as well, there are many others
to choose from as well, use simple copies somewhere else if nothing else).
You will be tinkering for a while to get things to your liking. You will
make errors and you will wish to roll back to that works less than
optimally version in place of the doesn't work at all versions.
Disclaimer: programmer by formal training, sys-admin by vocation, so my use
model and skill set are not the most common for nmh use.