I used MH in the mid-90s. I was inspired by cks@cs.utoronto.ca. I worked at a regional ISP, and my boss used PINE (which was like Nano for email) and the power users used Elm (which was a popular MUA before it was known as a language). Yet, I used MH.
I decided on MH because I had a habit of subscribing to mailing lists, or at least being enrolled on them, without caring too much whether I read the messages. So I wanted a sort of NNTP-newsfeed-like way of splitting up all the mail into folders so that I could get work done while ignoring whatever was on those lists.
I believe I used procmail, piping everything that came in through ridiculous regexps and having MH sort them into mail folders, as it was wont to do. It was lovely, and I seem to recall always having a zero-size mail spool because even the unread stuff was going into a folder for later checking. I didn't use BIFF. Remember biff, not the VIC-20 user, but the mail notifier. I didn't need a mail notifier, because I always had mail. It was just neverending. MH helped me come to terms with that.
My highly customized MH environment was lost to the four winds when I left that regional ISP, and since I had no equivalent shell-based multi-user networked system in 1994, I didn't recreate MH and it fell by the wayside, for me, but probably not for Chris Siebenmann.
I decided on MH because I had a habit of subscribing to mailing lists, or at least being enrolled on them, without caring too much whether I read the messages. So I wanted a sort of NNTP-newsfeed-like way of splitting up all the mail into folders so that I could get work done while ignoring whatever was on those lists.
I believe I used procmail, piping everything that came in through ridiculous regexps and having MH sort them into mail folders, as it was wont to do. It was lovely, and I seem to recall always having a zero-size mail spool because even the unread stuff was going into a folder for later checking. I didn't use BIFF. Remember biff, not the VIC-20 user, but the mail notifier. I didn't need a mail notifier, because I always had mail. It was just neverending. MH helped me come to terms with that.
My highly customized MH environment was lost to the four winds when I left that regional ISP, and since I had no equivalent shell-based multi-user networked system in 1994, I didn't recreate MH and it fell by the wayside, for me, but probably not for Chris Siebenmann.