dtmail
More info
- Creator
- Sun Microsystems, as part of CDE
- Type
- Email client
- License
- LGPL 2.0 (since 2012)
- Source
- sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv
The mail client of CDE, a Motif-dressed descendant of Sun's Mail Tool that read the mailbox straight off disk and handed attachments to ToolTalk.
When CDE was assembled in the mid-1990s, each vendor contributed what it already had, and Sun supplied the mail. The base was Mail Tool from DeskSet, rewritten from XView to Motif and named like the rest of the desktop: the dt prefix plus an abbreviation. The program opened a local mailbox in mbox format, typically /var/mail/user over NFS, and sent through sendmail. There was no transport protocol of its own, which was fine as long as mail lived on the same Unix host people logged in to.
What set it apart from a plainer client was the integration. Attachments were MIME-encoded and could be dragged between messages, dtfile and the desktop; an attached meeting proposal opened in dtcm via a ToolTalk message, with the user never needing to know which program received it. Compatibility with Mail Tool's own attachment format was kept for years, because thousands of Sun users had archives in it. Mail moved to IMAP servers and web clients during the 2000s, and dtmail followed CDE out of Solaris. It lives on in the open-sourced CDE code for anyone convinced that email looked best in grey Motif frames.