Columbia MM (Mail Manager) is acomputer program for readingemail using acommand-line interface. It was developed atColumbia University between 1984 and 1990, and is aUnix reimplementation of a 1978TOPS-20email program, also known as MM, which in turn was an update of an earlier program by Mike McMahon ofSRI International. Columbia MM has also been built on other platforms, includingDOS andVMS.
MM was unusual for its time in its support of "message sequences," which allowed the user to select a subset of messages in a mailbox forbatch operations. The message sequence feature proved so popular with MM users that TOPS-20 MM authorMark Crispin went on to implement similar filtering capabilities inPine. Columbia MM also offered context-sensitive help, command completion, and command history, carried over from the TOPS-20 version, before such features were commonplace in Unix software.
After a lull in development in 1990, MM development picked up again in 2002 with an interim release, including changes for Linux portability andPOP support.
At Columbia University in the late 1970s, theDEC-20 based MM was adopted in favor of DEC-20 MAIL and RDMAIL, and was used initially among the programming staff. Its use spread to the students and faculty, to the extent that several courses came to use it heavily. It was likely that, if one did a SYSTAT on any DEC-20 at Columbia between 1978 and 1988, they would see about half the users runningemacs and the other half MM, with only occasional time out for text formatting, program compilation, and file transfer. When Columbia switched to Unix-based platforms during the 1980s the MM program was rewritten for that platform and development continued on the program for the next 20 years.[1]
As of version 0.91 (2003), MM worked on the following platforms: Solaris (2.5.1 and later); SunOS 4.1; Linux (e.g. RH7.1); FreeBSD 4.4; OpenBSD 3.0, NetBSD 1.5.2.[2]