I'll apoligize in advance if these questions have allready been asked,
but none of the subjects said anything about elm help.

How do I have elm include a signature in the mail?  [usually you
just make a .signature file and the put "reomtesig = .signature", but
that dosen't work here].

And how do you set elm up to automatically save email you've sent to
the recipent's mailfile in the "Mail" directory? [I think it's
"save = ON" or something like that, anyways, I tried it, didn't work.]

Thanks in advance.

59 responses total.

"remotesig" works a lot better if you spell it correctly.  :-)

Try "remotesignature".  That works for me.

Let's go back a little - to unix for dummies. What does "remotesignature"
do, and exactly where does one put it, how, and invoke it? (It is not
*in* Unix for Dummies - know theyself, it is said.)

remotesignature is the name of the file that is used for offsite mail.
On netmeg I have a 5 line remote signature, and a one line local sig.

the remote lists all my e-mail addresses, my phone number, full name, etc..
while my local just lists my name, and phone number.

Rane, you would put a line of the form
remotesignature = path
(where path is a pathname for your signature file) in the file
/u/rcurl/.elm/elmrc
For example, the line in my file is
remotesignature = $HOME/.elm/.remotesignature
(since $HOME expands to the path for my home directory, and I put my
remote signature in a file called .remotesignature inside my .elm
directory).  The equivalent line for my local signature is
localsignature = $HOME/.elm/.localsignature

The parameters on the left of the equals signs are keywords for elm when
elm reads your elmrc file as it comes up.  The fact that I used the same
names (with the leading dot) as the filenames is purely for my convenience;
you can use any legal filename anywhere you have rights to write (& read) a
file.  You could even do something dumb like
localsignature = /etc/motd
if your purpose were to be weird instead of to provide information.  (That
*does* seem to be the purpose of some signatures, after all!)

Somewhere around grex there's some doc on the elmrc file.  I never can
find it when I want it, but you can use the find command.

Try /usr/local/lib/elm/doc.

Thanks.  I remembered /usr/local & got lost after that.

Ah.  "signature" instead of "sig"  Got it.  (The newer elms just use "sig")

So how about the second question?

Thanks!

According to /usr/local/lib/elm/elmrc.samp :

        savename = ON

will save to a file with the sender's name.

I need Chap 7, part "safely asking stupid questions ", from UNIX Without
Words. I did not understand anything from the answers to my question(s)
in #3. You see, I don't know what a "signature file" is; in fact, I don't
know what a "signature" is in this context. I presume that I don't use
one, which has not caused me any problem (that I know of), so I presume I
don't need one. So why am I asking about it? That's the strange thing
about working with computers - one is always tempted to learn about
something that one has no known use for. 

A "signature file" is a small text file that, if you have one, is appended
to the end of your off-site mail messages and usenet news postings.
Typically,people use it to give their name, email address, company
affiliation, and often put in some more or less clever aphorism, witticism,
or ANSI graphics as well.

John, in far too many cases it's a *large* text file.

So its an automatically appended "header" or "footer"? I've seen those.
They usually take up too much space, and really aren't needed (since
the return e-mail address is always present). Guess I'll pass.

Perosnally, I only mind long signatures if they're longer than the actual
message which was sent, i.e. one line of mail and five lines of
sig.  I've seen this happen way too often.

I believe netiquette is that sig. files should be limited to 4 lines.
Not everybody respects that guideline.

It's a footer.  And I've been told that it's a good idea (for remote stuff)
because the automatically-generated return path may not actually get mail
back to you.  Or something of the sort.

When you see sigs running around 10 or 15 lines, over & over from frequent
posters, you kind of get tired of people trying to be clever.

This response has been erased.

The Usenet software we are running here will only include the first
four lines of your .signature, even if there are more.

I assume that's on *outgoing* stuff, right?  Sometimes I wish there were
a similar function on incoming stuff.

Right.  Of course, there's nothing that the news software can do if
you read your .signature into the editor manually, rather than
letting it be automatically appended.

Yeah.. I hate that 4 line limit.. it's on netmeg too, and screwed me up
when I wanted to have a 5 line sig.  :-/

No, it set you straight.  :)

According to #9 savename = ON should work.  According to every time I run
elm, it doesn't.  What path should I have it save to?  I've tried several
variations off of /h1b/u/ecy/Mail and none of them work.  Pardon me,
when I send mail I get the error message 'Unable to save to (whatever path
I've specified)'  This message appears under the block where you are asked
if you want to Send, Forget, Edit.  So, what am I doing wrong?

Next question.  Any ideas why I would loose cc:ed messages, especially
when I check mailq when I leave elm, and the letters I just sent are
sitting there (outside party, and myself)?  

Thanks.

One thing you can try is to ditch the /h1b from the beginning of
your path name.  It's not technically correct to use it.  Try
/u/ecy/Mail and see what happens.

Worst comes to worst, check out the documentation files in
/usr/local/lib/elm/doc.  They can tell you far more than I could.

Probably you're not specifying a filename.  /u/ecy/Mail is a directory;
you need to say /u/ecy/Mail/filename to save it to "filename".

What is in Mail? When I try to cd Mail, I get
  Got error 13 (Permission denied) in during chdir
What's that mean? How do I see what is in Mail?

Mail is your Elm mailfolder directory.  It's ordinarily permitted
700, so only you can access files in it.  What program did you
attempt the cd from?

Program? I tried to cd from my home directory, just to look around.
Is Mail something that only elm can access? I think my question is -
how do I look at what is in Mail?

Picospan has trouble cd'ing into directories that are permitted
only to the user, so if you tried the cd from the "Ok:" prompt, 
you'd get that error message.  It should work okay if you first
get to a Unix shell prompt (via the "sh" command) and then do
the cd.

What you should see in your Mail directory is a bunch of files
containing mail that you've saved.  They are ordinary text files,
so you can "cat" or "more" them.

Please give me some elementary instructions on getting to Unix shell
prompts (where I don't think I have ever been), and maybe what (else)
I can do there? I better know how to get "home" again, too. 

I had tried, as one of my variants, /u/ecy/Mail but no go.  I'll go read the
doc, now that I have a location for it... (rtfm, eh?  <g>)

Marc, I thought that if the savename = ON, or the line in the elmrc where
it asks if outbound mail should be saved, would automatically append/create
a file name for outbound mail?  Guess not.

Ok, thanks for the docs location.

   Type either "!sh," "!csh," or "!tcsh," depending on which shell you want to
get into.  For the purposes of "cd" they should all do the same thing.  When
you are done, and want to return to bbs, simply hit control D.  On the
other hand, if you only want to do one command, and stay in bbs, then you
can just put an "!" before the command, such as "!cd."

(31 slipped in.  32 was in response to 30)

RE 26.  Do you use elm as a mailer?  If you don't, you probably don't have
a Mail subdir.  When I started using elm, it created the .elm subdirectory,
where it stores the rc file, and aliases, and it also created the Mail dir
to store mail messages. 

(excuse me for slipping in there, Steve... )

Going into !sh let me cd /u/rcurl/Mail. Thanks everyone! Now, how does
stuff get put into Mail. In !elm, you are offered a chance to save
with the default file =mailer. I used that, but then couldn't find the
file. Is that what went into Mail? (After that, I changed the filename
to something I could find in my directory.)

I looked at the !elm documentation files in /usr/local/lib/elm/doc. Now,
could someone direct me to *readable* documentation for !elm, please?

I think that =filename puts the file in the current directory, whatever
that happens to be when you call Elm.

As for the documentation - well, this *is* a Unix program, what do you
expect?  >8)  If, on the other hand, you don't want those icky control
codes in the text, read the files whose names end in ".fmtd".  They're
already formatted, and are quite readable on my machine.

I expected the files named ?.fmtd would be totally cryptic, and didn't
look at those. Unix defies (my) logic. I tried to save in the default
=filename, and could not then find the file in the current directory.
Renaming the file did the trick. (Or, my memory is failing me :). 

"=" is an abbreviation for "~/Mail/".  So if you save to the file
"=foo", it will end up in the mailbox "foo" in your Mail directory.

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