Public domain package.
In the late 1980s, early 1990s, ELM was viewed as one of the top emerging ASCII-based mail clients. It was availabe (source compiled) on all major UNIX platforms.
For that reason, and because of its ease of use, it was picked as the default mailer on the UNIX systems manages by the Research Computing Support Group. On those systems, mail was aliased to invoke elm.
By the early 2000s, ELM has not kept up as much as some others (namely PINE, presented in these course notes). Nonetheless, it still is our default ASCII-based linux/UNIX mail client.
If the command
returns a full screen interface similar to 8.1, then elm is being used.
