The RAND MH Message Handling System


Welcome to the home page for the MH Message Handler, an electronic mail user agent. MH was developed as an alternative to large "one-size-fits-all" email systems. Its approach is still unique -- and very useful -- today, some 30 years after it was first written.

MH was originally developed by Bruce S. Borden at RAND Corporation. Then Marshall T. Rose and John L. Romine at the University of California, Irvine, Information and Computer Sciences department maintained it until 1997 when version 6.8.5 was released.

MH is now in the public domain and has been replaced by nmh, the "new MH". MH compatibility is also provided by GNU mailutils.

This SourceForge site exists partly for historical purposes; it preserves almost all of the files from https://www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/ including source code, documentation, and mail archives.

This site also has the living in addition to the dead; the book MH & nmh: Email for Users & Programmers can also be found here. It contains all you need to know about MH, xmh, exmh and MH-E, and was originally published by O'Reilly Media during the 1990s. It's now maintained by you!