Help needed deleting my mail, new & old.  Thanks.

27 responses total.

  What mail are you using? elm? Pine? details I need details

 then, I might be able to help you.

I'm st using mail (nam

After mail displays the message, type "d" at the ? prompt.

Bill Long again.  I still need help. I'm using PicoSpan, not Unix.  I tried
once with the "d" on fresh mail (first reading), but it still didn't delete.
Maybe I should try it again on my next mail.  But the big problem is old 
mail.  I found some instruction somewhere on changing directory, and on
mbox as a file of old mail, but I didn't get any results.  Could someone 
throw me some instructions, without assuming I know a bunch of stuff about
"mail" that I may not.

   Bill, it might pay you a bit to switch to elm or pine. I have had elm
for the past year and I absolutly love it. To use it, type elm at the
next ok prompt. (make that !elm at the ok: prompt. 

  Once you get into elm, you type o to set up your options like an editor,
(I use vi although bbsed is a lot easier if you don't know anything about
vi.). Then, when you get mail, merely type !elm at the OK: prompt and
your mail will be listed piece by piece. Hitting <return> will display
it, and once you`ve read it, you can delete it if you choose to, right
on the spot.

  then, your worries about mail will be gone. (hopefully)

Bill, I agree on that, with one reservation: are you emulating (or using)
something relatively sane & known to Grex, and do you specify it correctly
in your login script (or at a prompt when you log in)?  If not, don't use
Pine or Elm.  But if so, go to it.

I use Elm all the time.  My one comment is that with my terminal set to
ansi-new or ansi I have problems with lines near 80 characters long - I've
pretty much switched to vt100 because of this.

Thanks, folks, that should do it.  I'll try elm.

Well, elm didn't work for me- said window size was too small.  If i could
maybe have some help in understanding the files listed by !ls: mail, mbox,
dead.letter, and a couple mixed number & alpha names.  None seem to be 
directories, correct me if i'm wrong.  Can i delete one or more of the above
to get rid of my mail.  If i did so, would i have no file to receive mail 
into.  What is the structure of the mail file...just one big file appended
each time i receive mail- that doesn't make sense, but when i do !ls mail is
** it just gives me "mail" back...if it were a directory it would list the 
files in the directory....   Also, i read an info item early in my grex 
experience that mentioned mbox and change directories when i know nothing 
about unix and preceeding commands with !; now i can't find that item: does
anyone know its header or item #?  Thanks folks.

 what is your Terminal type? One of the reasons that elm doesn't run is
that your termcap isn`t set properly. Tis a prolem for root.

Bill, the "window size too small" message indicates that Elm doesn't think
your TERM type has the capabilities to do the cursor movements etc. it wants
to do.  What type of terminal are you running (or emulating)?

That file Mail is indeed a directory.  But if you're saving mail with the
mail program, it's probably going into mbox, which is indeed a single file.
(By default, if you save mail with most anything it's going to just be
appended to some one file somewhere.)  There's an officially-sanctioned
structure to these things: a line beginning "From " (note the blank!),
other heading lines, an empty line, and lines containing a message up to
the next "From " line.  If you were to start a message line with "From "
your mail program is supposed to add a ">" at the beginning to prevent it
from messing up this structure.

Those "cbf...." files are (I think) partially-entered responses left when
either the system crashed or more likely your connection was terminated
while you were entereing an item or response.  Unless you want them for
something go ahead and delete them.

You can read them, or your mbox, with the commands cat or more, if you want
to look at them directly.  If you are using something more than a dumb
terminal, & it's supported here, & you tell Grex what it is (correctly) when
you log in, you can also read or edit these with an editor such as vi - and
you could run elm and select mbox as your current folder & read/delete/
respond to those messages.

You actually have a lot more files than you mentioned.  By default, ls
ignores files whose names begin with a period.  Try ls -al
The a option gives you those "hidden" files, and the l gives you more
information - including a d flag at the begining of the line for any
directories.  (Most of those hidden files, in your home directory,
track what you've read in the conferences you've joined.)

Thanks.  I've been using VT100, but recently got Procomm, which will allow me
to upgrade  terminal types.

VT100 is fine; it's what I'm using.  If you got that window-too-small error,
either you said some other TERM when you logged in (or let it give you
something else) or you garbaged something in your environment thereafter.

In fact, looking at your .profile, the relevant line says:
    eval `/usr/ucb/tset -s -m 'dialup:?vt100 -m 'su:?vt100 "${TERM-dumb}"`
and I suspect that the thing about TERM-dumb is your problem.  I confess
I've never bothered to figure out how that line works in detail, so I'm not
sure.  Mine says:
    eval `/usr/ucb/tset -s -m 'dialup:?vt100' -m 'su:?vt100' "${TERM-vt100}"`
and seems to work fine, so you might try that.  I think you're probably
setting your TERM to dumb by default ...

try 
setenv TERM vt100
or
TERM=vt100
export TERM

(That's for a one-time fix, or for your .profile if you don't want it asking
you every time.  But that may not get your TERMCAP set right.)

(And the first form is if you use csh - the second if you use sh.)

I thought I had changed my term. from dumb to vt100 a month ago.  When in 
went into !change to change my terminal type yesterday,  it said that that
section of change was down, to be resurrected in a couple days.  Maybe it's
been malfunctioning for a month, unnoticed.

I've also been trying to remove my old mail with the unix rm (delete file)
command.  I type !rm Mail/* and get the message "no file or directory named
Mail/*."  I've also tried !rm /Mail/*, same result.  Any tips out there one
unix pathnames/file structures?

I can't tell what is in your Mail directory (you're the only one with access
to it).  From a Unix shell prompt try
ls -al Mail
or
ls -alR Mail
in case you have subdirectories under there (which I doubt).

One possibility is that your Mail directory contains files whose names begin
with . (a period).  rm will ignore those unless you specify them by a
template beginning with a .

In fact, it's quite likely.  You could try
rm -i Mail/* Mail/.*
This will give you error messages saying that Mail/. and Mail/.. are
directories; that's fine.  If you get any *other* error messages they should
be more helpful.  (You'll probably get the one about no file named Mail/*
again.  I left that on there just in case something gets added in the
meantime.)

There are at least two places where mail is kept, in the file
named   mbox   in +your+ directory, and in the file 
named /usr/spool/mail/yourloginid.
  
the mail command will use /usr/spool/...  and once inside that
process, from the  &  prompt, the command    d x  will d_elete 
the x'th numbered message. In fact,   d x1 x2 x3 x4   will delete
four messages at once. 
  
To identify which emails to delete, use the command    h   and each
email will show up numbered, 1-n. 

There may be a way to specify a contiguous range of emails to delete,
but it *can* be dangerous that way.

Also, once you have read an email, which returns you to the  &  prompt,
the command    d    without a number will d_elete +that+ particular
email, and the email-pointer increments to the next higher numbered
email.
  
If you do nothing to the "current email," the mail process will append
everything you have read onto the file   mbox   in your directory.
  
Now that the mbox file is stuffed to the gills, you may wish to sort
through that file. Two ways to do that (unix almost always provides
more than two ways to do anything ... heh-heh). 
  
The easiest,. if you are familiar with the mail process, is to
issue the command    mail -f mbox   and instead of using /usr/spool/...
file, the switch and argument above will tell mail to use the  -f_ile
named  mbox, and all is as described above, with one exception. mail
will NOT move any messages anywhere else unless explicitly stated with
a s_ave fylename command, so the normal   pre  command has no effect.
 
That's enough babble for now, and may solve your situation in an
incremental level.  
  
If you want to trash the entire mbox file without looking at it
with either   mail   or an editor (the second way of editing mbox),
you can use that famous    rm   command, as in    rm mbox  from any
system prompt. Note, however that there is +*NO*+ recovery from  rm !

One last note:  If it all gets screwed up and you get as 
confused as possible (or maybe just a bit more) use the command  x  from
the & prompt and mail will quit and pretend you were never there. That
is the saving grace from real snafus.

Thankyouthankyou TS  Taylor. i did !vi /usr/spool/mail/chi1taxi, that got
me where i could read my unread mail, and typed (for the 2039 lines of mail)
2039dd, which deleted all lines in file, leaving 1 line 1 character.  Then
i quit, using :wq  which writes the changes (deleting all lines) and quits the
editor.  One problem, while i was piling through my mail, j worked to cursor
down, but k, which is supposed to cursor up, also cursored down.  Oh Valerie.
  Thanks again, relief after two weeks.

Um, Bill, there are reasons not to do it quite that way.  I hope you won't
have problems, but:
- The first line of your mailbox (if it's not *completely* empty) should
  always be a standard From line, or things may get confused.  (If you
  want to empty it in some such way, go into sh (for some reason this
  doesn't work under csh) and issue the command
  >/usr/spool/mail/chi1taxi
  which overwrites the file with nothing at all.
- Things also could get messed up if you and something else (the mail
  daemon, most likely) wind up trying to update the file at the same
  time.

But glad you got in there and got to it!

This response has been erased.

re #21:
   If you want to empty a file in csh, "cat > path/filename" followed by ^D
will do it.

Or, you can do ":>filename".  The ":" is necessary because csh
doesn't interpret just ">" as a null command.

(Note that ":>filename" works in the Bourne shell, too.)

Since this is Unix, add this one to your bag of tricks, and I
suspect that the shell will have +nothing+ to do with this
one       cp /dev/null /path/fylename      don't have
to worry 'bout extraneous characters, or line noise, or noffin-else!

Btw, chi1taxi, you are certainly welcome - - no problem.

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