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! -valerie249 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.
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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.)
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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>
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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 ...
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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).
So *that* explains the question. (And maybe I should watch it elsewhere?)
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I just keep typing quit, until grex gets sick of it and hangs up.
How do I use elm? Is it just "elm" (no quotes) like invoking "mail"? What does elm do that mail doesn't?
Basically, it presents a nicer front end for handling mail. It also lets you put received mail into different "folders" so you can catagorize read mail anyway you'd like.
to use elm... just type !elm at the ok: prompt. then when you have mail use !elm to read it.
or without the bang at a Unix prompt. For the most part it lists the most likely options when prompting you, which makes it a lot easier to use than mail. You can specify a username on the command line to just mail a message; but (unlike mail) elm will let you just run it even if there's nothing in your box.
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Well, I like it - I often want to thumb back through some old mail. (Not very old, given the disk space issues. Sigh.)
I've started using elm and I like it.
I've got some Elm questions:
1. I know how to save mail to a folder. What if I wish to save it to an
external file?
2. Can I access the "folders" as regular files? For instance, I've a
long message that I saved and wish to download now, and I'd like to do so
directly, rather than fighting through Elm's change folder command etc.
3. How do I set pico as my mail editor?
Thanks.
I'm no expert, but I think the folders are just text files. The message, including all its header lines, is just appended to any existing file (possibly only if the file has the format of a series of mail messages, but I doubt if ELM checks). I regularly download my folders (Mail/sent and Mail/received) to my PC, and I sometimes need to browse through them there. (And then I wipe them to zero bytes here, obviously.) To set your editor to pico, I think you can just put a line editor=pico in your .elm/elmrc file. You might possibly need a full pathname to the editor program. Information on other things you can set in this file is in a file /usr/local/lib/elm/elmrc-info. The only thing I've got in mine is copy=on, which saves my outgoing mail to my sent folder. (Not a good idea unless you plan to purge the thing pretty often.) Did I hit everything?
Usually when you start up ELM for the first time, it creates a Mail directory for you (with a capital M) and all your mail gets saved there - when you do an 's', it'll save it to the file =user - the = specifies that it gets stuffed in the Mail directory. It is indeed just a text file. If you do an !ls of your Mail directory, you'll find individual files with the mail you've saved. If you want to save a piece of mail to another file, after you hit the s, overwrite the =user with the file name. You don't even have to backspace. That will save it to a file in whatever directory you're in (usually your $HOME)
Damn case sensitivity anyway! I should have known that's why I couldn't look at the "mail" (not "Mail") directory. <sigh> Thanks.
Yeah, Unix is like that. Sorry, UNIX is like that. >8)
Yes. I kind of like case-sensitivity in a lot of things, but filenames? But that's the way it is. (And the place mail gets saved, by default, if you just leave it until you quit, is =received. You can abbreviate this by > when you use the s (for save) command and the c (change folder) command in ELM. (Or I guess that's elm. <sigh>))
(I kind of figured case sensitivity might be the problem, since as far as I know that doesn't come across in a synth)
Well, it can if I set it up to do so, but I generally don't, as it makes reading slower and more cumbersome. The sentence: "Sam and John went to the park" would sound like: "cap s lower am and cap j lower ohn went to the park." Annoying as you can see. Oh well.
Do I have to do anything special to send mail through Internet from Grex? Is the address Jim_knox@um.cc.umich.edu sufficient to send Email to Jim Knox on Um?
Yes, that address will certainly get to Knox. Also you may be interested
inknowing that the _ can now be exchanged for a . to be
consistant with the Internet protocol. So the address can also be
jim.knox@um.cc.umich.edu your mail address here, btw is
cwb@grex.ann-arbor.mi.us
Is there a way to get ELM to show me my messages in chronological order. The list seems to be in reverse chronological order, and that's a little disconcerting when I get 12 letters.
Yes. At the "command" prompt, choose "options" (lower case o), and for the "sorting criteria" option, choose "mailbox order".
You can probably set it to sort differently by putting something in your elmrc file. A list of parameters is in /usr/local/lib/elm/elmrc-info, & there's other useful doc in the same directory (as I recall). I think the sortby keyword is likely to be it, but I've never used it (& am not sure what the legal values are). Sorry to dump a bunch of maybes out, but I don't have time to play with it now.
re #61: Thanks for that tip. I've always hated the reverse order, but never thought about doing anything about it.
Aha. Thanks indeed, John. If your default, like mine, was "Reverse Mailbox order", then here's what you need to do to change it permanently. Enter elm, and type "o" (lower case) for options. Type "S" for sort. If you want to examine the possibilities, type space to cycle through them, but to just toggle off the "reverse" just type "R". Then type ">" (greater-than) to save the change into your elmrc file. Note: saving in this way saves out *all* your current settings. I previously had almost nothing in elmrc, now there's a lot. I may just go into it with vi & delete anything I just plain don't care about.
Now that's what I call service. Thanks all.
For what it's worth: I also took the opportunity to change my elm "User Level" from Beginner to Intermediate. What this seems to mean is that it lists all (or at least more) of my options & is a bit less wordy. I can't see why anyone who's successfully used elm for 15 minutes would prefer Beginner.
Yeah, I just switched to Intermediate, and I'm wondering why I didn't do it a long time ago. (Probably because I didn't know about the O command.)
I've been using !elm, and like it better than "beginner", but often get caught in a loop where the message I'm answering keeps coming back at me. What's the sequence for replying, and then quitting, and not keeping a log?
what I do is 1. read the mail 2. go back to the menu and I select r 3. you are then prompted to either quote the message or not 4. after you are done replying, go back to the index with i and select d for delete 5. q will let you quit upon which you will be asked if you want to delete. select y.
OK, I'll try it. Send me some mail 8).
Rane, if I understand your problem correctly, I suspect you're typing a
newline ("Enter" key or whatever) after some command like "s" for "send".
In elm, any response that's always a single character doesn't need a
newline/enter/carriage-return - and if you type one, elm thinks it's your
answer to the *next* question. Often, the default action is to read the
current message, & so that's what you'll get.
Or am I answering the wrong question again?
(Some questions, like what folder to save things to, accept a string of
characters. For these, elm demands a terminator (newline etc.).)
I think you're right, Dave. I'm used to entering my responses. I'll pause just a little longer to see what it does on its own.
My usual pattern is: 1. Begin at the first message. 2. read it. 3. (optional) reply to it [r] 4. Delete it. [d]. Elm then displays the next message and I repeat 2-4.
I noticed that M-Net is now using a program called 'mailtrim' to help shrink the size of mbox files. Apparently it reduces the long mail addresses in the header to just a login id (but I'm not sure what else it does). Anyway, it reduced my 13K mbox to 8K. Do we have something similar here (or could someone program such a beast)? Sounds like it might be a fair space saver for people that use mail a lot.
What "activity" does mailtrim perform? I asked over there ad nobody answered. "Trim"has several functions, which ones are employed?
I believe it removes the Received: headers, as well as other headers that the author of mailtrim felt were extraneous. My personal feeling is that something like mailtrim isn't very useful for inbox files, since it's more trouble than it's worth to remove these headers only when they're not needed (they can be *very* useful when tracking down a bounced mail message). It might be worthwhile for the longterm storage of mail, but if you're going to do that you'd be better off compressing or gzipping the file, and getting even more of a space savings. Remember -- disk is free, or close to free. CPU is expensive.
Disk is free? I though it was relatively rare on this system... I don't believe this program used much CPU time to do its job. Not anywhere as much time as Picospan took to fire up the first conference. I figured this utility was more useful for those whole use mail "locally" or within this system. I can see wanting to keep header info for long haul messages. I can't see why that wouldn't be possible in a mailtrim type of program (get rid of l of local headers and save other-system headers). Oh well.
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Disk may be rare on this system; after all, the Third Law of Disk Dynamics says that data expands to fill twice the space available to it. However, it is very easy and very cheap to add disk to the system; just get a bigger disk and install it. On the other hand, it is fairly difficult to upgrade the CPU horsepower of the machine without buying an entirely different machine. That's why disk is cheap or free, and CPU is expensive.
Well, then, I'll stop with the ideas to save disk space. And I'll no longer worry about keeping my directory space small. Grex will just buy more disk drives! Okay, I'm kidding. Is this really that CPU intensive of an operation (it sounds to me more like an automated text editor) that you don't think the savings in disk space is worth the CPU time involved?
Well, perhaps not. We can always get it and try it out -- no harm in that.
It's not something that runs constantly either. You just run it if you want to, so anyone wanting to retain those long address headers would just not use it.
Well, I asked the author of mailtrim (Leeron Kopelman, lk) and he said he'd "be honored if Grex would wish to use my mailtrim script." I put a copy in my home directory and notified popcorn of its existence. lk's conditions of use: "Feel free to use and modify it as necessary, and I only ask that proper attribution be retained." Take a look and see what you think.
I'll go look at lk's mailtrm, but for the record, and in the spirit of this discussion I jsut came across an sed command which works REAL well. Before I spout, I'll check out lk's thing though ...
Decreasing the heaaders would be good for me, as my speech synthesizer takes a while to wade through all that info that I usually don't need. This is particularly true for off-Grex mail.
I took a look at lk's mailtrim script and it's nice - I'll move a copy over here and play withit . I did some mod's to it - for my purposes and asked him about them. So far he has had time only to say that it's a bit more comprehensive because he hadn't included some of the "overhead" that occurs when there is a postmaster-boounce email header. And the nice thing abouot it is taht it'll work on, say, your mbox or any other file in which you keep track of mail. I tend to segment my mail into topics and catagories. The space reduction tween his and mine is about 0.8% - both exceed 25% character reduction. One other nice thing I like about it is that if you append mail to a file, and run mailtrim, it'll only affect the new stuff, the previous mail has already been trimmed.
There are some changes that should be made to the script to make it a little more "bulletproof" -- in its present form, it *could* trash the file that a person is trying to trim, if run when the disk is full. Also as written, a copy of the file being trimmed could be publicly readable during the time the trimming is being done; not a good idea for mail. I believe I know what needs to be done to fix these problems, & hope to do so when I get a few spare personal CPU cycles.
Oh, I full recognize that there are some customizations to be done to use it over heere (or anywhere else for that matter, due to the potential of a publicly readable mailfile (Not a GoodIdea) but the majority ofthe good stuff ahs been worked out . remmers, do you have a copy over here already or would you like me to send you one?
I've got a copy.
Thanks, remmers, for looking it over. I think it has potential, but I'd hate to have its use cause any problems. I look forward to a new, improved mailtrim.
I jsut sent my mods over to remmers - we'll see ...
I've taken a look at "mailtrim", and it seems to have a rather
significant problem. Take a look at the following two messages;
the first before being run through "mailtrim", and the second
after having mailtrim run on it:
Message #1:
From mju Mon Mar 8 21:46:49 1993
Return-Path: <mju>
Received: by grex.cyberspace.org (Smail3.1.28.1 #4)
id m0nVuKG-0003bOC; Mon, 8 Mar 93 21:45 EST
Message-Id: <m0nVuKG-0003bOC@grex.cyberspace.org>
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 93 21:45 EST
From: mju (Marc Unangst)
To: mju
Status: R
Thisbe a test. It is only a test. I'm sending mail to mju, but he's
really mju@grex.cyberspace.org. You should make sure you have a
From: header in your mail, otherwise it will bounce. You need a
Date: header, too.
This is a line after the date.
This is another line.
-Marc
Message #2:
From mju Mon Mar 8 21:46:49 1993
Return-Path: <mju>
To: mju
Status: R
Thisbe a test. It is only a test. I'm sending mail to mju, but he's
really mju. You should make sure you have a
This is a line after the date.
This is another line.
-Marc
It's certainly made the headers smaller, but it's also chopped several
lines out of the message body. While this may be a great way to
save space, I don't really see how it beats deleting the message
outright.
Mailtrim should probably be fixed to only try to trim the header lines
before we install it here. Yes, I admit that I contrived this
example after examining the mailtrim script and figuring out how to
break it, but I still consider it a rather significant problem...
That's right, I noticed it too. The script makes no distinction between message headers and message bodies. It could be made to, but would require extensive rewriting.
That is one of the problems mju, and remmers, which is why I wanted
to ask if arithmetic is permitted is the sed editor? I have a
fix for the "body text" problem if I can make sed work with a
specific number of lines.
mdw actually (years ago) came up with the original idea (found dredging
aroundin old conference files elsewhere).
But I don't ahve the sed & awk book (yet.
What I would want to do is force sed to operate only on a pre-identified
group of lines, minus 4 or 5.
It comes from this dmw quickie:
It comes from this mdw quickie:
sed '1,/^$/'d fyle
The thought is to make sed operate only in that block of text, or
to operate on that bloock of text minus perhaps 4 or 5 lines *back*
from the /^$/ location, whichis the first blank line in the email
A mail file is a plain ascii file containing some mail messages. Each message begins with some header lines, followed by a blank line, followed by the message body. The first header line always begins with "From " (note the space character following the "m"). A line of a message body that begins with "From " always has a ">" character prepended automatically so that the software cannot confuse it with the beginning of a block of headers. (Somebody please correct me if the above is inaccurate.) So you'd want a mailtrimmer only to pay attention to lines starting with "From " up to the next blank line, passing all other lines through unchanged. Yes, I believe "sed" can be made to do that. Details are left to the student. :) (Must say I'm not clear on why "mailtrim" would be desirable -- as a disk-space-saver, it's inferior to "compress" or "gzip". If the goal is to spare people reviewing their saved mail from wading through a lot of headers, I think mail readers like "elm" can be trained to suppress headers that a person doesn't want to see. Maybe I'm missing something, though. Can someone enlighten me?)
It should be rather trivial to write something like this in Perl;
in fact, I did something similar to weed out the Received: headers
from mail to the Esix mailing list on mudos.
One other thing you have to remember is that RFC-822, the document
that specifies mail header format, allows continuation lines. So,
you can have the lines
From: Marc Unangst
<mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us>
To: User 1 <user1@host1.foo.org>,
User 2 <user2@host2.bar.org>
The contents of the "From:" field are
"Marc Unangst <mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us>", not just "Marc Unangst". If
you delete a header from a message, you have to be careful to
also kill any continuation lines.
Here is the Perl script that removes Received: headers; others are
welcome to adapt it to "mailtrim" purposes.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -- # -*- Perl -*-
# rmreceived -- remove the Received: headers from a message, for
# redistribution to a mailing list.
{
$inheader = 1;
$gotrcvd = 0;
while(<>) {
if($inheader) {
if (/^Received: /) {
$gotrcvd = 1;
next;
} elsif (/^[ \t]+/) {
next if ($gotrcvd); # continuation line
} elsif (/^\n$/) {
$inheader = 0;
print;
} else {
print;
}
} else {
print;
}
}
}
Can I do a 'mail -f mbox' on a compressed mbox file?
No, you'd have to uncompress it first.
Well, I can do a 'mail -f mbox' on a mailtrimmed mbox file. Though I'm sure the space savings isn't nearly as much compared to a .Z file.
You can always do "gunzip mbox; mail -f mbox; gzip mbox".
Too much typing...
so make an alias that does that for you.
It also consumes lots of resources to zip&unzip every time you use it.
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re 102: Too much screwing around with Unix...
OK, I agree that it would be nice to have a mail trimming program. I wrote one today. It's quite short. For the moment I'm calling it "strip" to distinguish it from mailtrim, but I don't feel strongly about its name. I planned to have it work in a unix standard way as follows: strip <yourmail >strippedmail and also strip mail1 mail2 mail3 But I havent gotten the 2nd way to work, so you have to use it only with redirection for now. It removes the things I wanted removed, namely Return-Path, Message-Id, X-Mailer, Received, Status, and From: (but it saves the From with no colon) It also deletes continuation lines of deleted items. Anyone who wants to try it may find it as /u/srw/strip Let me know if you find any bugs (i.e. check its output before you pitch your only copy of your mail, I won't be responsible for lost mail... You're all beta testers for the moment - I *have* tested it myself though). Tell we what (if anything) you wish it would (a) also delete, or (b) not delete. If there is a difference of opinion about what would be good for it to do, and if I get lots of constructive criticism, I will add options to make everybody happy. Waiting to hear comments... -srw
Heh. A little competition is a good thing...
Ok, a little competition there is (mine is littler than yours, but it works better NHAY!) srw's /u/srw/strip is 32K big, mine, /h1b/u/tsty/trim, is 838 only! And, strip is compiled C-code, mine is edit-able, readable, ASCII text! So there could be almost 40 personalized variations of trim before it would take up as much disk space (saving space is the goal here). Granted, I fought SED for a bit (brand new to sed, oh, well) but it works great, less filling too. I chose to take out From and leave in From: but that is easily adjustable, of course. I figure you could run it on mbox repeatedly (as it fills) or on any other file appended with specific email. My test was to save a bunch of various emails into a file local, international, natiional, and "bounced" stuff and then trim it and see if the "good stuff" was still there. It was! I do *not* recommend that it be run on the mail spool because of my deletion of the From line instead oftheh From: line. For me, the From: line is more useful, but NOT so with the mailer. So, have at it run a 32K tank over your mail or an 838 character precision nibbler. Oh, srw, I'm *not* knocking what will turn out to be a nice binary, it's just that I don't write C and I suppose I'm jealous, while at the same time, *real* cheap with any code-that-works. And credit is due (cat the trim file) and remains to lk, who started this on another system.
It's true that a shell script is an order of magnitude or two smaller
than an executable binary of comparable functionality, but don't forget
that a shell script has to run a shell in order to work, and a shell
is an executable binary...
I think srw's trimmer, like lk's , can delete lines from a message
body if they "look like" header lines.
Think maybe I'll dig up the source code to my "mailpk" program. It
looks for certain mail headers and does distinguish between message
headers and message bodies.
- John "my code can beat up your code" Remmers -
Well I was trying to address mju's converns about tsty's trimmer doing things to the body of the mail. I don't do shell scripting, as I'm new to unix, but I've been writing c for 15 years. Maybe *I* should be jealous. I am not certain about the deleting of "From" vs. "From:" lines. I just reread mju's comments in #92, and it appears that the "From:" are needed, though I also ran mail -f mystrippedmail and it had only the From lines, nor From: lines, and spotted all of the msg boundaries fine. As far as competition goes, mine may be bigger, but at 32k is no tank, and will run regardless of what shell you're using, will port in its source code form to a Dos machine, uses fewer copmute resources to trim. My offer still stands to modify it to make the most # of people happy. The source is /u/srw/strip.c - it's not too big, and is visible to all, so if you're into it enuf, read it and figure out what will break it - then tell me, and we'll all have a better trimmer. I'd especially like to hear remmers's opinion about what it will trim that he wouldn't want it to trim, as I'm willing to fix it if it can be done.
Well, if the body of a message contains a line that starts out the same way as one of the headers that is being trimmed, such as "From: " or "Received: ", the program deletes the line even thought it's not part of the header. At least, that's the behavior I observed when I tried it out. It's definitely possible to fix this -- a block of header lines *always* starts with "From " and *always* terminates with the first empty line thereafter, so one could exploit this to train the trimmer to distinguish between header blocks and message bodies, and only do deletes in the former. One other suggestion -- the trimmer could be made more user-configurable by having it read from a file the header prefixes to be deleted, rather than hard-coding them into the program.
What if a person included (forwarded) a message w/headers in their message?
A brief summary of mailbox format: 1. A message begins with a "From_" line. 2. The headers immediately follow the From_ line. 3. After the headers, there is a single blank line, followed by the message body. 4. Any occurance of From_ at the beginning of a line in the message body has ">" prepended to the line. 5. The message body extends until the next From_ line, or until EOF is detected. It is imperative that any mailbox trimmer leave in From_ and From: lines. Reply-To: must also be left in. From_ is necessary to maintain the intermessage delimiters, and From: and Reply-To: are necessary to ensure that the message can still be replied to.
I've made my own attempt at a mailbox trimmer; it's in ~mju/trim. Note that it's a Perl script, and is even smaller than the shell scripts that have been submitted so far (but then again, Perl is much bigger than the shell). It also has somewhat more limited functionality; you just type "trim <file >file.trimmed" or "trim file >file.trimmed" or "cat file | trim >file.trimmed". In other words, it's a normal filter. It's your responsibility to move the new mailbox over the old one (although that could be added, if people really really wanted it). Also note that it's very beta-test right now.
Thank your mju for the mail format summary. I will modify my trimmer to honor every aspect of that definitive set of rules. remmers, your suggestion that it be configurable is excellent, your proposed solution that it read prefixes-to-be-deleted from a file is probably better than my planned-but-not-yet-executed idea of having my program use unix options to add/remove prefixes-to-be-deleted. When we are all done, does someone plan to submit all the trimmers to an independent authority? Nahh, let's just run 'em all up the flagpole(s).
Ok, I have changed /u/srw/strip as follows: It now only strips out lines beginning with "Message-Id: ","X-Mailer: ", "Received: ", or "Status: ". It will also remove any continuation lines if present. It limits its stripping to the headers as defined so clearly by mju earlier. It will look for a file named .stripp and if it finds one, it will use the prefixes defined in that file (one to a line, please). So remmers and mju should approve of this approach. Now the rub... By limiting the stripping to the headers, I find it is not stripping out lots of header-like lines that appear in mail I have received which had been forwarded. Consider: /u/srw: ls -l mail* -rw------- 1 srw 68521 Mar 14 12:00 mail -rw------- 1 srw 57730 Mar 14 19:45 mail.s -rw------- 1 srw 51872 Mar 14 19:48 mail.s~ the 2nd one is a stripped version of the 1st one the 3rd one was stripped by the older version, allowing stripping out of the body. I think I prefer that despite the objections raised by others. I therefore propose to add an option to permit stripping from the body: /u/srw/strip -b <mail >mail.s I will post here when I have accomplished this. The old body-stripping version of strip is /u/strip~ but anyone who cares should say something soon or it will vanish. What do you folks think?
I'd prefer that a mail stripper/trimmer not remove anything from the body of the message, such as "blah blah blah. I just received this mesage <newline> From: joedoe@damn.friggin.cold.org and thought you should reply to it".
After I posted 116, I downloaded my (stripped) mail file and went through all 57.7K of it, and I think I'm in agreement with you Kent. I wanted to cut out all those Received: lines I get when my son forwards me humorous tidbits he picks up off the net at school, but there are other examples where I want to keep lines that look the same, so I can trace where stuff came from. Until I can avoid trimming off stuff that I want to keep, I will stay out of the body. I am still getting 1-57730/68521= 15% reduction in size, and the file (a) is usable as is without unzipping, and (b) can still be zipped if you like for further compression. Now I won't be doing any zipping, because I just download the accumulation when it gets too large, but it's an option for others. If people like this program, I think its name should be changed, because it has been pointed out that the name means something else. What should we call it? mailtrim, mailstrip, ?
Specific response to remmers #111, graph #2: That condition is exactly! why I wanted to know if tehre was any arithmetic available in sed? That real short mdw sed which deleted lines 1 through $ (first blank line) could return a line number and then sed could operate exclusively on those line numbers. But how to do arithmeetic in sed? Or should I concentrate on copying 1-$ into a h (hold space) and editing the hold space and then g (pasting) the edited hold buffer back into the email at line #1, leaviing a single blank line, and deleting the next group of consequtive blank lines up to the body-text? Actually, it looks like the whole header ought to putinto hold space, then exchanged with the rest ofthe message, bodytext-> holdspace AND holdspace-text-> editable space, edit header, and then paste the bodytext back into the file ........ Ishouldn't dothis in mental realtime, and bore you ....later
I'm tempted to say, "sed is really the wrong tool for the job -- try awk or Perl," but you appear to be having too much fun for me to try to stop you.
Lets see...mail...
amputate
behead
carve
chop
clip
crop
decap(itate)
diss(ect)
hew
lop
maul
mow
pare
plane
prune
rape
reap
rip
rive
scrap
scrape
shave
shear
shred
slice
snip
sunder
trunc(ate)
whittle
trunkentn, that's it! mju, mail it if you wish, sed is (uh, err, "fun"), and I'm curious
i've noticed that mail has stopped offering a cc: option, giving me instead an automatic "eot" at the end of a message. what does "eot" mean, and why, suddenly, can i not carbon copy messages to other ids at the end of a letter?
Same question as entered in Agora under the New OS item. EOT means End Of Transmission, ASCII character CTRL-D, hex 04, decimal 4, but why it prohibits any cc: field, I don't know - yet.
An Elm question here. Now that I'm on a mailing list or two (and I
asked Meg if it was ok, <g>) I want to find a more efficient means of
reading my mail. What I'd like to do is use the index to delete everything
I don't want to see, then read only the undeleted items. Is this possible
in Elm. Next best thing would be kill files like in Trn. Suggestions?
Chris
No problem. All you need to do is set up a filter file that deletes any messages which fit whatever criteria you specify, i.e. you don't want to read anything with the word "foobar" in the title, or anything sent by a particular user. Somewhere around here is the Elm help directory, which will tell you how to set up a filter. Or you can look at mine, it's in /u/robh/.elm/filter-rules, and I'll read-permit it. You'll also need to create a .forward file, to tell the system you want to use the Elm filter. Okay, I found the help files, they're in directory /usr/local/lib/elm.
There is also a rather extensive Elm manual in /usr/local/lib/elm/doc. You'll probably want to start out with Users.fmtd and maybe also read Ref.fmtd.
I think he probably wants to do that sometimes, but if I understand him he asked for something a little different. Chris, you can select an item (by using j & k to move down and up, or by specifying its number) and then enter d (lowercase) to delete it. The cursor/pointer will move down to the next non-deleted item, if any, so if you start at the top and alternate d and j you can rapidly move down the screen marking the ones you want for deletion. At this point you've just *marked* them as deleted (and it will put a D by them to indicate this). You can re-select one by number or by *capital* J or K to move down or up to it (lowercase skip deleted items), and undelete it with u. Or, at your convenience, you can type $ to resynchronize your folder, which will cause the deleted items to be removed (after you confirm it). (If you say *not* to delete them, they become unmarked.) The same thing happens if you quit or if you change folders, of course. If a whole bunch of messages match a certain pattern, you can enter control-D. You will be prompted for the pattern and then they'll all be marked for deletion (along with any others that match). I haven't used this in any but the most trivial ways; I assume that the patterns are regexps, & I'm not sure what all is covered (subject, sender? cc list? message text?).
Marc slipped in; I was referring to Rob's response.
I really like ELM. I think it's better than pine.
Re #126: does the word "foobar" have a history? I've looked at a Mac app called MacEuclid 1.1, which purports to be useful for "creating, editing and analyzing reasoned arguments". I can't tell from the manual what it does (typical manual :-(), but it uses as examples objects like "Foos feel like Bars". Is there a connection?
I always thought of foobar as a corruption of the acronym "fubar". "fubar" originated (I believe) in the military, standing for "f___ed up beyond all recognition". (You may select any f word you prefer). For reasons I can't explain, the corrupted form "foobar" was adopted as a meaningless nonsense word by computer people at MIT in the early 1960's and has remained in use by computer-type people as such.
What I've *heard* is the same with "repair" instead of "recognition". We're definitely talking folk etymology here (not that it's impossible, though).
Grex is truly an educational experience! (Motto for T shirt?)
Etymology started earlier than that, first with SANFU, from WWII, and FUBAR was added very shortly afterward, and the R (int eh original) does stand for Repair. Oh, SNAFU is Situation Normal All F__(choice)__ed Up, which, of course is the internal opinion of Army sorts ....
Hmm... "F---ed Over and Out Beyond All Repair"?
Now THAT's a synthesis .......
In !elm, after entering the editor for a reply, how do I delete a range of line numbers (hoping that the answer isn't line-by-line)?
You're using bbsed, right? I think the answer is one line at a time.
I'm using !elm - *it* may be using bbsed. What other choice do I have in !elm, or do I have to use a different mail system, to get more flexibility?
I'd suggest using either VI or PICO as your editor in elm. That will let you delete a range of lines.
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In Elm, type "o" to go to the options screen, and then change your editor. Since you must have your terminal type set up correctly in order to use Elm, you might want to try the "pico" editor, which is easy to use (but requires a properly-set up terminal type). Hang in there. STeve and I are currently working on a "change" program that should let you make all these changes without having to edit any files by hand.
Some PINE questions.
1. I'd like to find a way to nuke all the menus in pine, or at least
minimize their occurrence, since they jst slow me down. How do I do this?
2. How can I change the defalt editor to jove instead of pico? I've tried
altering the editor= line in .pinerc to read "editor=jove" bt that hasn't
seemed to work.
Thanks in advance.
Chris
I don't know how to get rid of all the menus, but if you don't have any mail waiting and just want to send something you can type "pine <address>" and bypass menus.
I tried changing the default editor in .pinerc. And what I remember happening is that when you start editing something, you still end up first in the Pine/Pico editor. To get to your alternate editor you need to issue another command. Not quite what I had in mind. I suspect if you want to have a mail program with no menus, you'd better find another mail program.
What was that other command? And what is the "seedling" "sapling"
"old-growth" thing in the .pinerc file? I thought that might have something
to do with it, but various settings seemed to have no effect. Another
question, should .pinerc live in my home directory, or in some other place?
TIA
Chris
When you have another editor defined in your .pinerc, you can use Control-Underline to turn it on (or actually, switch to it). I couldn't get it to work here on Grex when I tried it. That seedling/sapling/old-growth thing is, as it says in the .pinerc, a novice/intermiate/advanced features switch. As far as I can see, it turns on a few more features at each step. I suspect .pinerc should live in your home directory. I don't know how pine would find it otherwise.
Yesterday, I created a .cfdir and copied all my .cf files over to it.
Now, I get the error message,
Problems restoring permissions of folder /usr/spool/mail/danr!
when I exit elm.
I don't think this has anything to do with the .cfdir per se. I'm
guessing that I've deleted some .* file, perhaps .elmrc. Anyone have
any ideas?
At least by default, elm sets up a directory called .elm, and in it you have not .elmrc but just elmrc. But I don't see why or how anything you might do in your $HOME should affect setting permissions for your inbox. Just checking on this, your inbox looks normal (as far as permissions and ownership) - except that I notice that for you and some 40 others the group is "staff", while for the rest of us peons it's "people" or "mail". But I'm pretty sure not all those 40-odd people are staff, so all this is probably due to something about what was happening when the files were created. I doubt that this is relevant, but it might be, so I mention it.
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Well, the problem fixed itself. I didn't do anything and it just went away.
Karma fix, don't ya just love it ...........
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thank you very much!
I just did mail -f mbox to look at some old incoming mail and I got an "enter message" prompt. I did . to exit that and got a list of messages in my mbox. Enter got me the first message, followed by "Mail Sent" and a Cc prompt. That isn't the way the mail command behaves on The WELL or on Netcom, IIRC. Was anything actually sent anywhere, and if so, what?
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I could try !mail -f mbox, but another Picospan system I'm on doesn't require the !. And I haven't gotten a bounce message back either.
Are tehre any advantages to the Picospan mailer as opposed to !mail? Would it make sense to redefine the mail command to !mail (or has it already been redifined to pine?)?
And if it's redefined so users who perhaps think they're in one mailer like mail are actually in another like pine or elm, what kinds of confusion can it cause? For example, what are the effects of doing mail -f mbox when the mail command has been redefined to another mailer? <Mental image of users accidentally mailing their mboxes to people>
The PicoSpan mailer, while devoid of subject, seems to allow for editing. Then again, maybe I haven't figured out either... no wonder I usually use CC.
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Why not pine? Then you have almost the same interface as in pico.
but "mail" is such fun, not to mention easy to use!
Since new users here may have experience on other systems, I'd set newuser to offer a choice of mailer, perhaps with a recommended default.
I think this would be wise. I think in particular of a couple of users I've talked to who routinely use mail rather than elm or pine, saying they didn't like the latter. These are by no means your typical Unix jockies, either, to say the least. I was very thoroughly surprised - in fact, I still find this extremely hard to believe - but that's what they said. Whereas IMO the only disadvantage to elm is that it's not guaranteed to be on any Unix system I may find myself on.
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Does elm (or other mailer) use MIME, like pine does? When I finally got MIME to work, I thought it was a great way to attach files to messages, including binary files.
The other end needs to support MIME too. This is a major disadvantage.
I've had Elm handle MIME files that others have sent me.
Have we ever determined what doing mail -f mbox from within Picospan does differently from what !mail -f mbox does?
What's MIME?
Is "mail" another of those built in commands that will not allow switches?
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Hm. I somehow had the impression that Picospan had its own, slightly different, builtin mail function.
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Could someone tell me, simply, how to mail? What usere id should I use and how do I know that the mail was recieved? I'd appreciate if whoever responds to this would put it in my mail box so that I can get some practice using the mailing system. Thanks
Coming your way! (Everybody! Send lisams mail!)
I just did. Watch Lisa get flooded with fan mail! ;-)
Hey, she asked for it. Literally!
Be nice everybody...
I am sure we will all be nice - but perhaps, numerous.
For anyone else who wanted an answer, your mail name on grex is your login name. If you want someone off grex to be able to send you mail, your address is your login name followed by @cyberspace.org For example, I tell people my Internet mail address is kaplan@cyberspace.org I know of no easy way to verify that your mail has been received unless the person writes back to you, but try using the "finger" command on the person in question. However, if the message does not bounce back to you with an error, it probably did get through.
Some systems support a mail header that's something like Return-receipt-requested: (followed by the address to mail notification to, I think), but this is generally a Bad Idea, for several reasons. All it tells you (*at* *most*!) is that the mailer at the other end got it. Many (almost all) systems don't support it, ignoring it; but some may choke on it.
Thanks everyone for the help!! I've recieved lot's of mail and am now getting the hang of it. pine is a lot like the mail system I use on the TC freenet. By the way, did you know that once you press "return", you can't get back to correct any previous mistakes? Just an observation :). Anyhow, one more question, can you get to the last entyr in a conference of 200 replies without having to scroll through the previous 199? Until I figure that out, I'm going to have a bit of trouble keeping up. If you do feel the need to reply, once again, would you send it to my mail-box? This time so that I can find it? Thank you, thank you.... Lisa (I meant, find the reply in the conference, not my mail-box. I'm not that lost!!!)
You can type read <item> and then 'q' to your pager after the first page. This should get you to the Respond or Pass? prompt. At the R or P prompt you can type 200 and get all the items from 200 on, or you can type "only 200" and get just that one response. You could also have typed read <itemnumber> since 6/10 and seen a lot fewer responses.
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At Respond or pass? you can also say -5 to read the last 5 responses, or whatever.
That didn't used to work - when was it fixed?
I'm surprised to hear that. It has always worked for me.
The thought is to make sed operate only in that block of text, or Pipe interrupt? Respond or pass? -1 #108 of 193: by TS Taylor (tsty) on Sun, Mar 14, 1993 (05:37): So, why didn't it go back to 193?
Because it got a signal from the pager when you typed in "q". Thus it went to the R or P prompt without cranking its internal counter. I.e., it isn't broken, that's just the way it works. The -5 still works if you get to the R or P prompt without quitting the pager in the middle, such as by saying read item# since <futuredate> which takes you right to the R or P with no items printed, and then -5 works. (I'll admit that this is confusing, don't really expect me to justify it. I wouldn't have designed it this way.)
MTS Confer II lets you use -x, no matter how you get to R or p. This has great utility when someone adds a new response to a very long item that I never chose to read, after two years. I'd just like to look at the last few responses. Hmmm, here I have to q, then n, and then r <item#> since <last login date>. If I must, I must.....
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Ah hah! There is a simple way. Thanks, Valeries.
Er..sorry, Valerie - there is only one popcorn! You can also abbreviate last to l, so life is copasedic again.
Cool. I didn't know that. I think I now agree with rcurl that it should be necessary though. The workaround is so easy that it's hard to care much, I admit.
The problem here is fairly complex, and has to do with how Unix deals with pipes and simultaneous processes. When PicoSpan wants to display an item for you, it starts up your pager by opening a pipe to it. Pipes are one of the IPC (interprocess communication) methods that the Unix kernel provides to processes, and as such the I/O is handled by the kernel. Usually the kernel keeps a 4K to 8K buffer of data between the writing process and the reading process, so the writing process doesn't have to block on writes very frequently, and the reading process doesn't have to block on reads very frequently, and the kernel doesn't have to do two context switches per character written/read. When you abort your pager, PicoSpan finds out about it the next time it tries to write to the pipe. Because there no longer is a process reading from the other end of the pipe, the kernel sends it SIGPIPE; this is where the "Pipe interrupt?" message comes from. (It's also where the "Broken pipe" message that the shell sometimes prints comes from.) Unfortunately, when PicoSpan gets SIGPIPE, it has no idea how much text has actually been sent to your screen. It knows how much data it wrote to the pipe, but there could be up to 4K or 8K of data that was sitting in the kernel's pipe buffer when the pager process died, and was discarded by the kernel. PicoSpan also doesn't know how much buffering there is between the pager and you; if you're dialing in through some sort of error-correcting modem, or connected over the Internet, there could be several Kbytes of buffered data in the various communications hardware and software. So, when you interrupt your pager, PicoSpan sents your last-read mark to the last response it wrote to the pipe. If it was a short item you were reading, this is usually the last response in the item, since PicoSpan had finished writing the data to the pipe and was just waiting for the pager to exit. If it was a longer item, however, PicoSpan probably just thinks you've read several screens further than you actually did.
That's great Marc. I didn't have all the details named properly in my mind, but it works as I surmised. My question is this: When Picospan sees a SIGPIPE, why doesn't it set the last-read mark to the end? This would be consistent, reproducible, and it would fix the broken -7 command, too. I believe that people hit q to the more prompt to get to the end of the item that they've already read, more often than not. When you 'q' over stuff that you haven't read before, you next either do an 'n' to reset the mark back to where it was, or a 'forget'.
It would be nice to have a set-last-read-response-# command too, but IMO Steve's right.
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Enough already! I'm new here, decided to follow the advice in the welcome -age and join info. All I want to do is send and receive mail. I just spent who knows how long reading 205 responses about mail arcana, and I still dont know how to get a & prompt or how to send a mail message. How about some really basic instructions for newbies on how to receive thier mail, and how to send it? Oh, and one suggestion: put it at the top. Thanks, - confused in Ypsi,
Okay, here's a start for ya: To get a & prompt when you have mail: type "mail" from the Ok: prompt. To send mail: type "mail robh" or whoever from the Ok: prompt.
Where are the dox for elm and pine? I'm looking to use one or the other to read my large quantities of mail, and want to dive in and learn the arcana of both, and figure out which will work best for me. The old instructions about /usr/local/lib/elm are no longer accurate.
Elm docs are in /usr/local/doc/elm. I don't think there is a Pine manual, other than the on-line help and the manpage.
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Just out of curiousity, what is the /var/spool/secretmail/ directory for? Isn't all our mail "secret"?
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It's been since Oct that this qstn was asked ... any clues to date?
I guess it's time to put it on the Board's agenda...
agenda writer should speak next ....
Such a simple question...and almost a month gone by with no response. Makes one wonder...
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Then I'd expect a board member to respond. It was raised as a possible board agenda item. At this point, since staff has been unable in some fashion to explain this scretmail directory, I'd like the board to investigate it.
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Okay (I expect it'll be something totally innocuous, but the choice of name leads one to think otherwise).
Hello?
If you'd like to find out before Valerie gets an answer from mju or meg, you can type !man enroll
Neat - encrypted email with password protection - thankxx for the clue bus. Is there any crypto quality level to this method? Like from 1-10 (with 10 being, I guess, pgp2.6).
The manpage says:
The knapsack public-key cryptosystem is known to be break-
able.
So are triple integrations and parabola intersections - the degree of difference, i guess, is what I was wondering about.
It's more a qualitative thing than a quantitative one, I'd say. The RSA system is not known to be breakable. I'd imagine it's hard to break the knapsack system, because when public key systems were first proposed 15 or 20 years ago, there were several kinds of problems that offered the proper 'trapdoor'. This included the knapsack problem. As far as I know they all fell except the RSA one, but only in the last 15 or 20 years.
I goofed in #224, I should have said "degree of difficulty," sted "degree of difference," (I really was diving in and forgot the distinction.)
hello?
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I didn't see an item about internet mail lists, so I'm asking here. If there *is* a lists item, please direct me to it! :-) This afternoon on public TV was a show about the internet. They were describing the various capabilities, including explaining the difference between usenet newsgroups and mail [subscription] lists. They showed how to find out about the currently known list of lists. But they did it so fast, I couldn't memorize it. It involved sending a message to <someID>@rtfm.mit.com where the message body contained just a line something like "sendlist <half-a-line-of-goop>/part01". If any of you know the exact details on how to do this, I'd appreciate seeing a reply here (or an appropriate place :-). TIA, KLA
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Warning: Beware of typing "inc" at the shell prompt. That's an MH command that splits up your incoming mail messages into separate files and stores them in $HOME/mail/inbox/, creating the "inbox" directory if necessary. The format in which they're stored makes it impossible for mail programs other than MH to read them. I use MH as my mail program and so use the "inc" command all the time. But for non-MH'ers it's use is a disaster. You're probably protected against this since the MH commands are stored in their own directory which is not on the default exe- cution path. I hope that my remarks have not hopelessly confused everybody.
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Yep, the mh binaries are in /usr/local/bin/mh. Good thing that's not a symbolic link to /usr/local/bin anymore.
Valerie, if you want to keep a mail program running all the time, you actually might want to look into using MH. It is all command-line based, and uses the paradigm of having each mail command be a separate shell command rather than having a monolithic "e-mail program" that you run. So you run "inc" to incorporate new mail, "show" to see a message, "scan" to show a summary listing of the current mail folder, etc. (Most people have shell aliases for commonly-used commands.) Now that we're on the Sun-4, it should even be fast enough to use at a reasonable pace...
Yes indeed, mh is reasonably fast on the Sun-4. The only problem I have with it is that sometimes it refuses to send mail when the system is very busy--I get a "no servers available" message. I think that's a well-known problem with mh; I should look at the FAQ and see if it has anything to say about it.
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Dunno why mh puts those "HELO protocol" warnings in the headers, but if you read your mail with mh, it never shows them to you. There's a "packmbox" script that comes with mh and that restores your messages to standard Unix "mbox" format (the kind that mail, elm, & pine like). It's in /usr/local/lib/mh/packmbox.
Both are due to one reason: "mh" is using SMTP to send mail. It is
"sendmail" that complains about the missing HELO's, that's required by
RFC 821. You can cause mh to send a HELO if you include:
clientname: foobar
in the mtstailor file; however, if the name given matches the host name
(ie, grex.cyberspace.org) sendmail will assume it's talking to itself
and exit. You could try saying just "cyberspace.org" for foobar;
perhaps that will satisfy sendmail & mh.
sendmail can also be optionally told not to check for loopback's
(probably a bad idea), or to not insist on helo messages, if necessary.
This won't cure the "helo" problem, but it will help: It would be to
rebuild mh to run sendmail to deliver mail, instead of connecting via
SMTP. That would avoid the whole load issue. When configuring mh, the
trick would be to specify:
mts sendmail
instead of the documented "preferred" setting of
mts sendmail/smtp
ucb mail & other mailers should already be running /usr/lib/sendmail, so
this is not an unreasonable change.
I really know not much about grex and telnetting, and i was wondering, do i need to download elm or pine? And is the spellchecking thing not supposed to realize that 'grex' is a word? The fact that it doen't register the server's name it's on is a little weird.
elm and pine are mail programs that run on grex itself. you should be able to type either of those commands at the main prompt (or '!elm' or '!pine' at an 'Ok:' or other bbs prompt). the spellchecker checks against a list of words that was distributed with it; probably nobody bothered to add Grex to the list when it was installed.
Hello, I have a problem with the mail program from grex, I am unable to
sent emails to anyone outside grex, every time I sent an email this
response comes:
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2006 14:34:32 -0500
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@cyberspace.org>
To: hakleton@cyberspace.org
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
grex-staff-exploder@hvcn.org
(ultimately generated from help@grex.cyberspace.org)
You are not allowed to send mail to external mail sites.
------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
What can I do about this?
The key is the last line: You are not allowed to send mail to external mail sites. apparently the staff email address is forwarding to an external site, but you can't send mail there. I'm going to post this in Agora, and see what staff has to say.
Isn't that e-mail actually forwarded from staff@cyberspace.org? Why isn't that permitted mail?
It's not permitted because the person sending mail doesn't have off-grex privileges.
I understand that if the mail were sent directly, but I didn't realize the system identified *forwarded* mail as coming from the original sender rather than the forwarder.
By the way, this is being discussed in coop conference, the Grex policy conference. We've just had a board of directors election, and the new board will convene in January.