CPS accounts no longer have e-mail quotas. But, please make sure to empty yo ur mailbox regularly. You can find out the size of your mailbox by typing
% ls -l /var/spool/mail/yourusername
Please empty your mailbox by saving messages to your home directory or deleting them. Mailboxes which grow too large will be subject to being moved to the users' home directory without no tice. Such action may be necessary in order to ensure that mail is delivered to all users.
The `mail' command gives you access to the UNIX mail facility. If you have received mail, you will get the message `You have mail' when you login. You can type:
mail
to read it. `mail' has its own prompt `&' at which you can type
`h' to see a list of the messages that you have received. Type
the number of the message to read it and `s
mail -f mbox
To delete mail messages, type `d' at the mail prompt `&'.
To exit mail applying all changes - e.g. really delete mail -
type `q' at the `&' prompt.
To exit mail, cancelling the deletion of messages, type `x' at
the `&' prompt.
To send mail, you type:
mail recipient@machine.domain1.domain2
Where recipient@machine.domain1.domain2 is the address of the person
you wish to send mail to. Mail prompts you for a subject line. It then
puts you into a simple line-edit mode so that you can type your message.
You can include external files in your mail message by typing:
~r
at the beginning of a line. The mail will be sent by typing a
single `.' at the beginning of a line, followed by RETURN or
a CTL-D character. (If you obtain a 'Cc:' prompt, you can
specify additional recipients of the message or just type
RETURN)
Incoming mail is stored in the system mail spool and it remains there until it is read. If the mail spool fills up nobody will be able to receive mail and we will have to delete old unread mail. Thus, read and save your mail! If you have a preferred machine to read your mail on, please set a mail forward to redirect incoming mail to that machine:
echo yourname@preferred_machine.domain1.domain2 > ~/.forward
elm
to read your mail. If you are
new to 'elm' it will ask you whether it should create certain
directories - answer 'yes' to these questions.To send mail, you can reply to a message (elm then uses the e-mail address of the message currently being read.), or send mail - here 'elm' asks you to provide an e-mail address yourself. Local addresses of people in the Polymer Center are just their username. In general, e-mail addresses look like bozo@wizard.nih.gov which sends mail to 'bozo' at the computer called 'wizard' in the domain 'nih.gov', if he is a real user. Undeliverable mail will eventually be delivered back to you - so you will always see whether your message has reached its sender. (typically undeliverable mail is sent back after 3 days)
Your own mail address consists of your user name, followed by argento.bu.edu. Mail to any of the machines in our cluster will be delivered to a central mail directory that in turn is accessible from all the machines- no mail is lost and you can read your mail on all machines alike.
Save will save the current message in a file; specify any file you like. By default, 'elm' will append the mail to a file in the 'Mail' subdirectory in your account which bears the name of the sender of the message. From there, the mail can be read using
elm -f =filename
or by using the change folder command once in elm.
This is a nice mechanism to sort your incoming mail.
Later on, you can still read, delete and reply
to messages contained in this file. If you decide to save
all messages on leaving the mail system,
they will go into the =received folder in the 'Mail' subdirectory.
echo bozo@watson.ibm.com > ~/.forward
The contents of your .forward file are read by the mail system, and all
you mail is sent to that address.
mpack and
munpack)Currently this capability exists on all Linux machines and is made available since MIME decoding is not available through ELM or Mail.
The munpack program on miranda reads each RFC-822
message filename and writes all non-text MIME parts or split-uuencoded
files as files. If no filename argument is given, munpack
reads from standard input.
If the message suggests a file name to use for the imbedded part, that name is cleaned of potential problem characters and used for the output file. If the suggested filename includes subdirectories, they will be created as necessary. If the message does not suggest a file name, the names "part1", "part2", etc are used in sequence.
If the imbedded part was preceded with textual information, that information is also written to a file. The file is named the same as the imbedded part, with any filename extension replaced with ".desc".
To decode a MIME message, first save it to a text file. If
possible, save it with all headers included. Munpack can
decode some MIME files when the headers are missing or incomplete, other
files it cannot decode without having the information in the headers.
In general, messages which have a statement at the beginning that they
are in MIME format can be decoded without the headers. Messages which
have been split into multiple parts generally require all headers in
order to be reassembled and decoded.
Some LAN-based mail systems and some mail providers (including America Online, as of the writing of this document) place the mail headers at the bottom of the message, instead of at the top of the message. If you are having problems decoding a MIME message on such a system, you need to convert the mail back into the standard format by removing the system's nonstandard headers and moving the standard Internet headers at the top of the message (separated from the message body with a blank line).
There must be exactly one message per file. Munpack
cannot deal with multiple messages in a single file, to decode things
correctly it must know when one message ends and the next one begins.
To decode a message, run the command:
munpack file
where "file" is the name of the file containing the message. More than one filename may be specified, munpack will try to decode the message in each file.
The mpack program encodes the the named file in one or
more MIME messages. The resulting messages are mailed to one or more
recipients, written to a named file or set of files, or posted to a set
of newsgroups.
To learn how to send MIME-encoded messages using ELM, please refer to this handout.
The program mimencode is available on all Linux and Sgi machines.
To mime-encode a message, one would type
mimencode filename -o outputfile
and then mail that file through any mail program.
To decode a file, one would save a mail message, strip the headers and type
mimencode -u filename -o outputfile
Pine is probably the most user friendly mail reader of the three. By typing 'pine' at your prompt, you will be taken inside the program. Once there, all of the commands for reading and deleting your mail are at the bottom of your screen. Some of the more common would be "i" which takes you to your Inbox, "v" to view a certain message, and "d" to delete a message.
Please note that with pine, you will not have to bother with encoding or decoding a message since the program will automatically take care of everything for you.