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U-010B, A PRIMER FOR UNIX MAIL ON THE SUNS
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TITLE: A Primer for Unix Mail on the Suns DOCUMENT NO: U-010B
DATE: October 9, 1995 VERSION NO: 8
INTRODUCTION
This document is a primer on how to use the default electronic mail
program (using the command mail) on ITC's Sun workstations. If you
prefer to use the same mail program that is the default on ITC's
RS/6000s, use the command mush rather than mail and get a copy of U-010A,
``A Primer for Mail on RS/6000 Computers (Mush).''
REGISTERING FOR NETWORK MAIL
Before getting into the actual mechanics of reading and sending
mail, a brief description of the mail addressing system is necessary.
Mail addresses conform to the domain structure which is illustrated in
the figure on page 2. The University of Virginia's global mail address is
"virginia.edu," as shown at the top of the figure. Each department with
a distinct mail subnet is given a unique sub-domain address, as illus-
trated in the figure by the entry ``ee'' for Electrical Engineering. ITC
owns the sub-domains "acc," ``acs'' and ``itc,'' and each of these con-
tains a large number of sub-domains, one for each machine. Machines are
treated as single domains. You, our hypothetical user with login (mail)
id xyz8f, are assumed in the figure to have your mail account on the Sun
named sunipc-3.unixlab. Thus your full mail address is "xyz8f@sunipc-
3.unixlab.virginia.edu," and this is the actual address to which your in-
coming mail is sent.
A user defines an alias for his full mail address by registering
this on the single machine which corresponds to the virginia.edu level of
the mail hierarchy. That is, your registration at the virginia.edu level
simply affirms that all mail addressed to "xyz8f@virginia.edu" is to be
sent to the full mail address "xyz8f@sunipc-3.acc.virginia.edu." So, your
friends at other places (or from within the University) can send you mail
U-010B A Primer for Unix Mail on the Suns 2
at xyz8f@virginia.edu, without needing to know where, in fact, you will
actually read your mail. To register, type the command mailreg and fol-
low the directions. Those faculty, staff and students who have re-
gistered get their primary mail addresses (and any other aliases as
described in Appendix B) printed in the electronic mail section of the
University Directory, accessible using the command whois.
Finally, we should point out that a user can forward mail from one
machine to another. Thus, if you have accounts on two machines, say poe
and sunipc-3, you can register at the virginia.edu level for receipt of
mail on sunipc-3, but you can forward any mail coming to poe (sent by
someone who addresses you as xyz8f@poe.acc.virginia.edu) to go to
sunipc-3. To forward mail on Unix machines, the forwarding address is
given as a single line in the file ``.forward'' in your home directory.
Thus, if you had an account on a second Unix machine, poe, then you would
create a file named ``.forward'' in your home directory on poe containing
the line "xyz8f@virginia.edu." This way you can arrange to have all in-
coming mail sent to a single machine.
INVOKING THE MAIL PROGRAM
To read incoming mail, you simply type the command:
mailCR
and you will get a display informing you of the first several incoming
messages which are sitting in your mailbox. This display ends with a
line consisting of the prompt ``&'' which indicates that you are now in
the mail program's "command mode" (see the next section). Each message
has a number, and to read message number 3, for example, you can simply
type 3 then press the RETURN key, and the text of message number 3 will
be displayed on the screen.
On the other hand, if you log in and want to send a mail message to
someone, you can do this without seeing your incoming messages. Suppose
that you want to send a message to Claude J. Boondock, whose mail id in
the phone book is cjb4w (note that this is an imaginary person!), then
you can simply type
mail cjb4w@virginia.eduCR
The system will then prompt you to provide a subject title for the mes-
sage, and after you have typed that, followed by pressing the RETURN key,
you will be in ``input mode,'' and you can type the message, terminated
by a line containing only a period (.) or <Ctrl-d> (hold down the "con-
trol" key and type the "d" key). You will see the EOT symbol, indicating
that your message is on its way, and a while later you will see the usual
Unix prompt.
If you mistype an address or give an incorrect one, your message
will be returned to you, sometime later, as undeliverable UNLESS the mail
address you gave is someone else's real address. In the latter case, the
mail will be delivered to the person other than whom you intended. The
appendices describe how to simplify the procedure of sending mail to peo-
ple with whom you communicate on a regular basis.
The mail facility on Unix systems is extremely complex and endowed
with numerous options. For a complete description of the facility, refer
to manual pages by typing man mail at a Unix prompt. Use the manpage
U-010B A Primer for Unix Mail on the Suns 3
command to get a printed copy of the manual, manpage mail.
INPUT AND COMMAND MODES
As mentioned above, the mail program is always in one of two states,
either ``input mode,'' when it is accepting text from your keyboard as
part of a message, or ``command mode,'' when it is responding to requests
from you (such as to read a particular message). There are over 50 com-
mands available, and we will only present a few of them in the next sec-
tion. Appendix C is a table of frequently used commands.
When the mail system is in input mode, it cannot recognize English
word commands, for obvious reasons, and thus a special mechanism called
the "tilde escape" is used to get the mail program's attention. Press
RETURN to get to a new line and then type the tilde ( ~ ) character, fol-
lowed by the command name. Thus, if you were in the middle of typing
text, and you realized that you needed to add bkw9j to the list of reci-
pients of this message (the " To:" list), you could type
CR (to get to a new line)
~t bkw9j@virginia.edu
CR
and then continue with the input of your message. A later section of
this document gives examples of some other useful tilde escapes.
SOME USEFUL COMMANDS
After invoking the mail program with the command mail you can peruse
your messages. Pressing the RETURN key will display the first unread
message, and subsequent unread messages can be seen by again pressing RE-
TURN. As mentioned earlier, a specific message, including one which has
been read on a previous occasion and left in your mailbox, can be seen by
entering the message number.
After reading a message you may want to reply. To do this, simply
type r if you only want to reply to the sender, or R if you want to get
your reply to all the recipients of the original message. Again, these
commands must be followed by pressing the RETURN key. Now you are in the
mail program's input mode (see above), where any text you enter will be-
come part of an outgoing message. You can enter your response, ending
your reply with a line consisting only of a period (.) or <Ctrl-d>. The
symbol EOT (for end-of-transmission) will appear on your screen, and
after a short wait while the reply is sent, you will get the "&" prompt.
Thus, you are now out of input mode and back into command mode.
After replying, or after only reading a message, you need to decide
how to dispose of the incoming message. One option is to simply delete
the message. To do this, type d and the message is gone forever. Alter-
natively, you may want to hold the message in your in-box so that you can
be confronted with it the next time that you log in. To accomplish this,
type in pre (for "preserve") after the message has been displayed.
Again, we remind the reader of the need to press the RETURN key after all
commands.
You can see the subjects (and sender login ids) of the first several
messages in your mailbox by typing the command h followed by pressing the
RETURN key. Finally, you can get a summary of all the commands by typing
?.
U-010B A Primer for Unix Mail on the Suns 4
To quit the mail program, type q which is the "quit" command, fol-
lowed by the usual
RETURN. If you do nothing to delete or preserve a message after reading
it, when you quit mail, it will be saved in a file named "mbox" in your
home directory. The command:
s filenameCR
will instead save a copy of the message in the file called filename. You
can also exit mail with the command x. This terminates the mail program
without modifying your mailbox (i.e., all new messages that were read
will be new again and all deleted messages will be undeleted).
SOME USEFUL TILDE ESCAPES
It sometimes happens that you decide that the message you are enter-
ing has become so garbled or libelous that you want to obliterate it and
start afresh (n.b., see the discussion on the use of an editor, below).
You can do this with the tilde command ~q (for "quit"). This disposes of
the garbled message and puts you back in the place where you were before
typing mail. If you invoked mail in input mode to send a message as
described above, the exit will send you back to the Unix prompt.
An editor is a program which helps you create files of textual ma-
terial. An editor makes it easy to add, delete, and modify text in an ex-
isting document. If you are planning to send an important communication
to one or more people, it is probably wise to first create the document
as a file, using one of the Unix editors. Again, this is outside the
scope of this document, but we will mention some of the the available ed-
itors on the Unix systems are Vi, JOVE, Pico, and Emacs.
JOVE and Pico are simpler versions of Emacs.
Suppose that you have carefully crafted a message, using one of the
editors, and saved it as file "manifesto." You now want to send this do-
cument to your friend Boondock and also to Slugg, whose e-mail address is
pws5t. Enter the mail system with the command:
mail cjb4w@virginia.edu pws5t@virginia.eduCR
First of all, you will be asked to enter a subject for the message.
Then, naturally, the mail system will sit waiting for you to enter text,
and you can do so if you want. But, in order to incorporate the contents
of file "manifesto" into the mail message, you should, while at the be-
ginning of a line, type in the command:
~r manifestoCR
and the contents of the file will become part of the mail message. You
can then add more text if you want.
Another tilde command, ~e permits you to use the editor named by the
EDITOR shell variable, while in mail, to modify the text of a message you
have already typed or included from a file. Yet another useful tilde es-
cape is ~p, which prints out the text of the message entered up to that
point.
Our advice to novice users is to first use the simple facilities
described above, and then to progress to an understanding of the file
system and the use of an editor. As mentioned above, ITC offers short
courses on these topics at the beginning of each semester. Moreover,
U-010B A Primer for Unix Mail on the Suns 5
they are covered in many introductory Unix texts, available in most local
bookstores.
U-010B A Primer for Unix Mail on the Suns 6
APPENDIX A
ESTABLISHING PRIVATE MAIL ALIASES
If you correspond regularly with someone whose address is hard or
long to type or if you correspond with a group of people, say a commit-
tee, you should create ``aliases'' for the addresses. To do this, use an
editor such as JOVE or Vi to create a file by the name of .mailrc in your
home directory.
Let us suppose that you want to refer to Boondock as "Clem" and that
you need to communicate with a group of three people, Larry, Mo, and Cur-
ly, who make up the stooge committee. Let us assume that the mail ad-
dresses of Larry, Mo, and Curly are, respectively, laa5b, mbb5b, and
ccc5b.
If you set up a .mailrc file in the form:
alias Clemcjb4w@virginia.edu
alias Larrylaa5b@virginia.edu
alias Mo mbb5b@virginia.edu
alias Curlyccc5b@virginia.edu
alias stoogesLarry Mo Curly
Then you can type "mail Clem" and the message will be sent to Boondock.
A message sent to Larry will go to laa5b@virginia.edu. Finally, a mes-
sage addressed to "stooges" will be sent to Larry, Mo, and Curly. Note
that while mail addresses like ccc5b@virginia.edu are case-insensitive,
private aliases defined in the ``.mailrc'' file (like Curly, above), are
case-sensitive. Thus if you tried to send a message to ``Stooges'' in-
stead of ``stooges'' it would fail.
APPENDIX B
GETTING ADDITIONAL GLOBAL ALIASES FOR YOURSELF
It is possible to have additional aliases created for you at the
virginia.edu level of the mail system. For example, if you want to tell
your friends outside the University to address mail to you as
lefty@virginia.edu, then you would make a request to have a "Personalized
Electronic Mail Alias" set up for you with that name. Like other mail
addresses, such aliases are case-insensitive. Your friends inside the
University can also use that address, but for them it is probably simpler
to set up the alias lefty in their own ``.mailrc'' file, as explained in
Appendix A.
There are, of course, some restrictions on permissible aliases of
this kind. No duplications can occur, and aliases cannot conflict with
regular mailids. We will also reject aliases which we judge to be in
poor taste.
Up to three of these aliases are published in the electronic mail
section of the University Directory (whois), along with the initial alias
created by registration at the virginia.edu domain level. To apply for a
Personalized Electronic Mail Alias, send electronic mail to
U-010B A Primer for Unix Mail on the Suns 7
postmaster@virginia.edu.
mas8y/October 9, 1995
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