Ream (email client)
Ream is a textual, screen-based email client developed by Paul Dourish at the Center for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. Initially developed in 1986, it was one of the standard email clients for the university and was in use throughout the campus for around ten years. Freely available on the internet, it was ported to a large number of UNIX-based operating systems including OSF/1, BSD 2.10, Unicos, Ultrix, HP-UX, and Dynix, and was made compatible with email infrastructures based on sendmail, MMDF, and PP.
Its more advanced features include an automatic mechanism for determining where messages should be saved (making it extremely fast to process incoming messages), a zero-cost-override input feature derived from Interlisp, stackable message selection based on regular expressions, a fast regular expression engine with a tiny footprint, and tight integration with external text editors, allowing users to rely on their favourite tools for composing and editing text.
Ream was developed at around the same time as Elm, and is similar in its broad interface approach.
Ream was designed in an era of multi-user minicomputer and mainframe systems, before protocols such as POP and IMAP were widely deployed. Similarly, it predated widespread use of MIME encoding, necessary to support file attachments. Lack of support for these features caused use of ream to dwindle in the late 1990s.