Elm (mail client)

Dave Taylor wrote Elm — ELectronic Mail — at Hewlett-Packard's labs in 1986. The Unix alternatives at the time were mail and Berkeley Mail, line-oriented programs where you typed commands at a prompt. Elm instead showed a list of messages on screen, let you move a cursor and read with a single key, and launched the editor of your choice for replies.

Taylor handed the project on, and a group of volunteers carried it forward as the Usenet Community Trust. Elm had a reputation for being unfriendly to beginners but dependable, which was exactly the reputation Pine was built to challenge. Mutt, released in 1995, borrowed much of its interface and advertised itself with the line that all mail clients suck, this one just sucks less.