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

249 responses total.

By now, I use elm all the time.  It's much easier to see what you're
doing.  But a warning to the novice: if your TERM variable (that's Unix
for what the system thinks your terminal is) isn't a good match to your
actual terminal type (or terminal emulator), you will have problems with
elm.  Ask almost anyone for help getting started with elm if you want.
Sooner or later someone should post instructions for it, too ...

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

Yeah, I've been using elm for months and don't miss mail at all.

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

I tried it, but its slooooooow compared to mail.  I get all I need done
with mail with a minimum of hassle.

This response has been erased.

re #6: oops.
(BTW: until I figured out how to have elm save copies of my outgoing mail,
I was often sending a c/c to myself.  Then when someone replied I'd often
get two copies - because of the R/r thing.)

This response has been erased.

Is it also correct that the   r  vs   R   is the opposite on the
"other" system? I've not looked all that closly, but I was called
to task on that very situation over on m-net .......

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

Hmmmmm, so I wanted to cat this to a fyle and edit it. But seems as if
this being alinked item, only the intro goes into fyle. Found the
same thing in info - where isthe original ?????

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>

This response has been erased.

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.

  There seems to be a substantial elm-using community here..  Would
people be interested in trying out pine?

   If we've got the disk, sure!

(I tried Pine on mudos, and wasn't all that impressed.  But I'd have no
problems with it being installed here.)

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

I'd be interested in getting the newest version of elm here.  

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.

  I just changed editors and, now I can say that elm+jove is the quickest
and coolest way to handle mail. don't change a thing!!!!

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 ...

This response has been erased.

hmmmmmmmm, thankxx

I took a look at PINE last night for the first time.  Like Marc, I am too
used to ELM to change now, but it looks like an excellent mail program for
the novice user, and if there's room for it, it'd probably be a good thing
to have here.  

  I think I'll compile it once the new disk comes on line, since it looks
pretty easy-to-learn, a good thing with many Unix novices around..

I tried pine on umcc today.  It's OK, but I think I'll stick to elm, too.

  Pine does have some nice things that elm doesn't (to my knowledge..
the latest version may have added them..)  One thing it does is understand
MIME.  Of course Grex isn't the best place to read multi-media messages,
but there are some commonly used MIME extensions that any new mailer should
know how to deal with (multi-part messages, richtext, non-USA charsets,
etc..)  If anyone is going to build the newest version of elm here and
it *doesn't* have MIME support then please tell me and I'll help you add
hooks that will invoke Nathanial Borenstein's metamail package..

Elm 2.4 already has hooks to call metamail for messages that are
in MIME format.

What is a person's internet address here if they wish to get mail via Grex?

                Pattie Rayl

person@grex.ann-arbor.mi.us

Thank you very much for the help!

Now... how does a person log off from the $ prompt without getting the 
Grex login: prompt?  It doesn't seem to understand off or bye, and exit
just gets me back to the login prompt.

                        Pattie Rayl

"bye" will work, but it's probably not in your path..  I invoke it 
explicitly in my .logout ("/usr/noton/bye")  I don't know whether 
.logout will work for you; it depends on your login shell.

should I create a link /usr/local/bin/bye -> /usr/noton/bye so it
will be in people's search paths?

  If you switch to csh, a slightly different shell, you can do this easily.
You just create a file named .logout in your home directory, and put in
it something such as the following:

echo See you later, Patricia
stty 0

(I think that's the right command, anyway).  To switch to csh, run the
chsh program, and enter /bin/csh when it asks what shell you want
to switch to.

I think maybe she wants to get back into the bbs, not just a different
Unix shell.  Pattie, just type "bbs" (without the quotes).  If you want to
join a conference other than agora (skipping agora, I mean), you can do
something like "bbs info" or "bbs cooking" or "bbs jelly" as you like.

If you bring up Unix from the bbs by doing "unix", it appears to chain off
into your chosen Unix shell, exiting the bbs.  To bring up Unix on top of
the bbs, at a Picospan prompt just type "!".  Then "exit" will bring you
back where you were.

In fact, if you're entering a response or something, you can still bring
up Unix on top of the bbs by entering (at the beginning of a line, with
nothing after it) ":!".  The colon tells it you're trying to call an editor
command or something, & the bang says bring up your shell.

Dave,

You misunderstood what I was asking for.  I wasnt' able to get Grex to
disconnect me... I had to manually drop carrier.  Typing Exit just got me
from the $ command to the Grex Login: command.  Bill was able to fix
things for me so I am now able to type bye, and he as an alias set up so
I get logged off, I believe by calling tty0.

Thanks for the help tho!
                                Pattie Rayl

   Moral for Grex: if the first exit don't knock you off, try, try
again.  The first exit logged you out; a second exit would have run
the special "exit" logout id, which woulda done just what you wanted.

Um, yes ... I normally quit from the wrong place often enough that I don't
*want* an auto-disconnect, myself.

As someone recently explained to me elsewhere, there is also a "hangup"
login which will do the trick.
(Just in case anyone else has this problem.)

Or, you can just drop carrier once you get to the login: prompt.
Won't hurt Grex a bit (unlike some other BBSes, whose operators
scream bloody murder if you drop carrier on them without getting
the BBS to hang up first).

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss