Grex's mail program - quick introduction

Nov 9 01:33 UTC 1992

When I was a new user - not too long ago at that - Valerie stepped in & helped
me a bunch of times.  When I was having problems with the mail program,
she put together some help (literally overnight, too), which will do to
post here until something better comes along.  With her permission, here 'tis:


Mail has two sets of commands.  One set of commands is good at the "&" prompt;
the other is used when you're in the process of entering a message.

The most useful command at the "&" prompt is "?".  Type a ? and press return.
The system lists out lots of things you can do at the "&" prompt.
The commands I use most often are:

"h" - lists incoming messages.  (up to 10 to a page, by default).  The messages
are all numbered.  Other commands can refer to messages by number.  For
example, to see message 3, you can simply type "3" and press return.

The mail system has a concept of a "current" message.  Usually it's the
first new message, or the message you've read most recently.  You can press
"." and press return to see the current message.  If you don't specify which
message to act on, commands act on the current message.  The "h" command
tells you which message is current by putting a ">" in the first column
before its message number.

You can type "r" or "R" to reply to the current message.  The two "r" commands
have different meanings.  On some systems, "r" means "send my reply message
to everybody who received the message I'm replying to", and "R" means, "send
my reply message only to the person who sent me this message".  On other
systems the "r" and "R" are reversed.  This can quickly become embarrassing
if you're not careful.

You can type "d" to delete the current message.  If you don't delete a
message after you've seen it, the message gets taken out of your system
mailbox of incoming mail, and moved to a file called "mbox" in your home
directory.  It's a good idea to check your "mbox" file to make sure it's
set to be readable by you but not by the rest of the world.

You can type "pre" to "preserve" the current message.  That means the
message will stay with your incoming messages, instead of getting saved to
your "mbox" file.

You can do "s filename" to save the current message to a file called
"filename".

To get mail back from a file named "filename", run the mail program
by typing "mail -f filename" instead of just "mail".  The default filename
is your mbox file.  So typing "mail -f mbox" and "mail -f" are really
the same thing.


When you're in text-entry mode, all the commands start with tildes (~),
except for "." to end the text entry.

The most important tilde command is "~?".  If you type tilde-question mark
on a blank line and press return, the system lists all the tilde commands.

The ones I use most often are ~q, to cancel sending the current message,
 ~p, to display what the message looks like so far, ~!command, to run
a unix command named "command", ~m, to forward the current message (indented
by a tab), "~r filename" to read in a file named "filename", and ~v to
run my favorite editor, vi, to edit the message-in-progress.  (Note that
vi is, um, *interesting* for the uninitiated.  Yell if you want to see
the vi tutorial that's sitting around in my home directory.  I'd suggest
reading through it first, before attempting to edit with vi if you're not
familiar with vi).
Another couple of tilde commands are "~sfoo" to change the message's
subject header to "foo", and "~h" to have Grex prompt you to re-enter
all of the message's header information.

The "Cc:" prompt at the end is asking for a list of people to send
"carbon" copies of the message to.  You can enter the user IDs of several
other people, separated by spaces, or just press return.


Hope this is useful!
-valerie

response 2 of 249:

Nov 9 03:18 UTC 1992

this item is linked as agora 63, the november featured link. join the info
conference and learn all sorts of great stuff about grex.

response 4 of 249:

Nov 10 02:12 UTC 1992

  Elm and xmh make the world a nicer place.  But for a TTY environment,
elm is the best.

response 10 of 249:

Nov 10 12:13 UTC 1992

(Yes, it's the opposite way on M-Net.)

response 12 of 249:

Nov 11 02:31 UTC 1992

This is the original (where I posted it).  Oops.  I'm writing this in Info,
which is where I posted the original.  But I don't believe that where you
are reading it makes any difference to piping it into a file.  What command
are you using?  <davel goes out on a limb, as a relative novice who, however,
does this sometimes with no trouble>

response 14 of 249:

Nov 11 04:31 UTC 1992

I've used this, & it works.  But (if I remember correctly) as one would
*not* expect from Unix practice, I *think* that it appends to foo if foo
already exists.  (Rely on that at your own risk.)

Another way is to do something fancy with Unix (my ideas of fancy being
a bit simpleminded here).  For example:
$ echo 'r 45 pass' | bbs agora > foo
(or you can put the "r 45 pass" in a file, (say) bar, and do
$ bbs agora < bar > foo

In these cases, to append you'd have to do >> instead of >
Obviously, you can use (say) "since 11/5" instead of an item number.

response 16 of 249:

Nov 11 06:13 UTC 1992

   If we've got the disk, sure!

response 18 of 249:

Nov 11 19:02 UTC 1992

    What are the similarities/ differences and 
advantages/disadvantages of elm vs. Pine?

response 20 of 249:

Nov 12 03:44 UTC 1992

Pine stands for "Pine Is Not Elm", and from what I've seen, it
certainly isn't.  It's designed to be easily-usable for the novice
user (possibly at the expense of the experienced user, but hopefully
not).  To fulfill this goal, all the commands are listed on the screen
in a menu; the number of commands is limited; and all the documentation
is available on-line via context-sensitive help.  Overall, it looks like
a pretty slick mail system; I'm just used to Elm now and don't really
want to change.

response 22 of 249:

Nov 12 05:01 UTC 1992

regarding #12-#14 about getting a file created from a bbs: the
command I've beeen using successfully (until now) has been, from
the Ok: prompt,    r ## pass | 'cat > fyle'   and stuff gets put
in fyle (usually overwriting cause fyle is a scratch file as far
as I'm concerned.) There was a slight varient in that command above
which involved    noresp  instead of   pass, but (at this point)
I'm not sure if there would be a difference
  
Say, should this discussion be a separate item? If so, the fw has
my permission to move the relevant stuff over there ...

response 24 of 249:

Nov 13 05:31 UTC 1992

hmmmmmmmm, thankxx