He might have had a point, but I would not want to respond to an email with cat! When I worked in Tokyo, all of our SunOS workstations did the BSD Unix thing,

He might have had a point, but I would not want to respond to an email with cat! When I worked in Tokyo, all of our SunOS workstations did the BSD Unix thing, and we got corporate email via some sort of X.400 relay over an IBM mainframe (I think). This was before Mutt or Pine and may have been Elm or could have been something else - I don't remember. But, it was weird, because we could just Telnet into our compadre's SunOS boxes in the US directly (dedicated line). I don't know what the rationale behind this "split" was, but whenever we called corporate IT about email being down - they would always say: "What's email?". They must have used a different word for their X.400 batch messaging system.