Internet Access: To the Information Highway/InternetAccessToTheInformationHighway1994.disc1of1.iso/inetinfo/mail.txt

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  E-MAIL: THE EASIEST WAIT TO COMMUNICATE WITH 30 MILLION PEOPLE

        E-mail (an abbreviation for "Electronic Mail") is
        probably the most used service that has to do with the
        Internet. Although there are other types of e-mail
        that do not touch the Internet in any way, Internet
        e-mail is, without a doubt, the most widely used
        network to transfer e-mail in the world. Every day,
        around 30 million people write messages to each other.
        The subjects range from "Hi! How are you today..." to
        "Our corporations second quarter ratings were down due
        to sluggish responses in the...".  Any subject about
        which you could imagine is discussed on e-mail. Other
        than personal conversations and business, there is
        research information passed to people via e-mail. Its
        much more efficient than the telephone because you
        don't have to be there to answer it and, you can store
        it for future reference.

        Most e-mail messages are text, however, files
        containing computer programs, graphic images,
        digitized sound and even movies can be sent via
        e-mail. Messages can be sent directly to a single
        person. Message can be sent from a single person to
        multiple persons (using the Cc: field) and
        person-to-person.  You can also use e-mail to give
        commands to a remote computer. That is how mailing
        lists work (see !mlist or !mlists for more info).
        Mailing commands back and forth is how many
        applications classified as Groupware operate

        There several packages you can send e-mail with. They
        are Elm, Rice Mail, mail and another
        called Pine. There are more but these are pretty
        common. Using Internet mail only depends on three
        things: Access to mailer software, a connection to the
        Internet and the knowledge of the address you wish to
        send to.

=============================================================================

                    A CLEARER DEFINITION OF E-MAIL

        Normally, e-mail messages consist of ASCII text. That
        type of text that you can read or print. Sending other
        types of data is possible but that data must be
        "encoded" into ASCII text before it is sent and then
        it can be "decoded" into the original data when its
        received. This allows users to send files that are
        non-ASCII (ASCII is another abbreviation for American
        Stantard Code of Information Interchange) and covers
        the characters A to Z, a to z, 1 to 9, all puctuation
        marks and a few printing control characters. Non-ASCII
        files include other characters as well as ASCII
        characters but have to be handled differently because
        of this.

        To convert a non-ASCII (we'll use the term binary from
        now on) file to one that is ASCII, we have to
        understand a few things. First, binary files have
        characters in them that have values from 0 to 255.
        ASCII files, on the other hand have only characters in
        them with values from 32 to 128. Changing binary
        values to ASCII ones usually involve using two ASCII
        characters to represent one binary one.

        Several programs are available that will take a binary
        file and convert or "encode" it so e-mail programs
        will handle it.  There is UUENCODE and UUDECODE
        programs for Unix Systems. There is ABE for MSDOS
        machines.  You can use Archie (see !archie or !archies
        for more information) to find encoders and decoders to
        suit your purpose.

=============================================================================

                     E-MAIL STORE AND FORWARD PRINCIPLES
---
E-mail is based on the fundamental concept of store-and-forward
technology.  This is really pretty simple.

The store part of store-and-forward refers to a message being
added to a storage system by the message's originator.  When the
recipient is ready, the message is forwarded for retrieval.

The important thing about this simple-sounding idea is that the
recipient doesn't have to be available when the originator
stores the message.  This enables the e-mail system to select
how the message will get from the place where it is first stored
to the place where it is retrieved (forwarded to the user).

---Navigator's Note:  Yeah, I know.  Store-and-retrieve would be
a much better term, but you're fighting two issues.  This first
is that everyone called is store-and-forward and the term is
generally understood.  The second is that the term came about
from a view of how the e-mail system serviced the user (messages
were forwarded to the user) rather than the more intuitively
obvious view that the user (or rather the user's program) goes
and retrieves messages.  This kind of complexity is what makes
so much of the computer industry obscure to outsiders.  If only
the undustry would ... oops!  I fell off my soapbox.

Figure 3.1.  The components of a store-and-forward electonic
mail system.

The route of an e-mail message may vary, depending on the
condition of the network.  Network outages, or maintenance and
repair (as well as local down-time), may have the e-mail message
waiting in a queue (also referred to as a spool) for later
delivery.

This is a very important point.  You might someday wonder why
you didn't get mail for two days and then got a huge load all at
once.  A computer that handles mail for you somewhere may have
been out of service, and as soon as it came back online, it
forwarded all your mail in one great lump.  Fun, eh?

E-Mail Parts

An e-mail message is made up to two parts -- the header and the
body of the message.  The header usually consists of

* From, which gives you the originator's name

* To, which tells you to whom it was sent

* The date and time sent

* The subject

In addition, information fromthe machines that "Received" the
message en route, a message ID identifying the sender, and other
(less useful, but included for your delectation) data are
included.  Here is a sample message, including the header:

Sender:  [e-mail]
Received:  from teetot.acusd.edu by iha.compuserve.com (5.65/5.930129sam)
id AA22262; Sun, 30 May 93 13:26:53 -0400
Received: by TEETOT.ACUSD.EDU (5.65/DEC-Ultrix/4.2)
id AA19273; Sun, 30 May 1993 10:12:04 -0700
From:  [e-mail] (Jerry Stratton)
Message-Id:  <[e-mail]>
Subject:  Re:  Beelzebub
To:  [e-mail] (Mark Gibbs)
Date:  Sun, 30 May 93 10:12:03 PDT
In-Reply-To:  <[e-mail]>;
from "Mark Gibbs" at May 27, 93 2:07 am
Reply-To:  [e-mail]
X-Mailer:  ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
>I'm writing a book on the Internet for Prentice Hall.  I found your gopher
>description and wondered if you'd like to send me a message about Beelzebub
>and what's there that we could include.
Hi, Mark.  Beelzebub has a number of functions.  First, it's
really an ftp site, but gopher folks don't need to know that.
It serves the Role-Playing community, and has become the mail
distribution site for the Shadowrun cyberpunk role-playing game.
This is due mainly to the fact that I edit an on-line magazine,
The Neo-Anarchists Guide to Everything Else, devoted to that
game.
I suspect that Beelzebub's main use is from the Role-Playing
community, but that's only because that community is organized
enough to have a monthly list of role-playing oriented ftp sites
distributed throughout the role-playing newsgroups and mailing
lists.
Beelzebub also contains a section devoted to reading and writing
comic books, and a section on political issues that I feel are
important.
Beelzebub is currently my personal playground, although I do try
to encourage other University of San Diego students, staff, and
employees to use it.
Beelzebub got its name from Macintosh.  It was originally an ftp
site all its own on a Macintosh, and the Macintosh's site name
was beelzebub.acusd.edu.  I don't know how the Mac got its name.
We've got a few odd names hwere.  The Macs in our lab are named
after various popes (and yes, there is a Cerebus).  You'd have
to be a fairly devoted C&W fan to guess where teetot's name is
from.
Jerry
[e-mail]
------
One pane of glass in the window,
No one is complaining, no, come in and shut the door,
Faded is the crimson from the ribbons that she wore,
And it's strange how no one comes round any more.
It Must Have Been the Roses

To

We can see who the message is addressed to,
[e-mail] (Mark Gibbs), and that Jerry actually
finished composing the message and handed it to his computer to
e sent at 10:12:03 PDT (the "Date" line).  It took only one
minute for his computer to take his message and send it out.
This seems fast, but in computer terms it's actually quite a
long time.  It's likely that his computer had a lot of other
tasks and e-mail to handle.

The "In-Reply-To:" line shows no only the message ID related to
this message but also who created it and when that message was
finished (May 27, 1993 2:07 a.m.).  The line following that
shows who the reply should go to.  This is useful in many
situations.  You could, for example, send a form to someone on
request and instruct their software to send the completed
version to someone in an administration department for
processing.  This feature may not work in all e-mail systems.

---Navigator's Note:  You can get ALM via anonymous FTP from the
archives at Ohio State University Computer and Information
Science Department (OSUCIS).  The address is
tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (128.146.8.60).  Then the fun begins:
you must install and configure it.  See your system
administrator first for permission.

How They Do It in Europe

In Europe, many people who use the Internet include a small
digitized picture of themselves in a special header field.  By
using either an e-mail system that understnad this feature or a
separate utility, you can see what the originator looks like.
It's a very hip thing to do, but it hasn't yet become popular
outside Europe.

Summing Up Headers

You can see that a lot of data is available in an e-mail header,
most of which is only really useful to programs.  In general,
you don't need to worry about headers; your e-mail package will
do that for you.  If you have problems though, knowing the
basics of what's in headers is very useful.

The Body

On some networks and computers, body length is limited.  Either
the e-mail system or the network software refuses your message
if it's too long.

Due to the technology of the Internet, all the data in the body
must be textcharacters.  That is, the characters must be
printable.  if you want to send data that isn't printable
(binary data), such as a program file or a database, you need to
encode it.  This encoding process can be done in several ways,
the simplest being to translate the binary data into characters
that represent the original data.  This always results in a
message that is bigger than the data itself.

If you ahve a large amount of binary data to send, it must be
encoded and sent in several pieces that are not so big that the
mail system or network refuses them.  At the recipient's end,
the peices need to be joined together and decoded.  Some e-mail
systems handle this work for you; most don't.  The most comon
encoding tool is called "uuencode."  Its opposite, the decoding
tool, is called "uudecode."  You can find versions of this
program for UNIX, DOS (and therefore Windows), and most other
operating systems.

Getting Attached

Attachments are chunks of data (usually files) that are sent
along with the message.  These attachments can be in either
format -- text or encoded binary data -- and, if the latter,
might be a program, a spreadsheet, a word processor file, and so
on.

The latest and greatest standard in this are is MIME, the
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.  MIME enables all sorts
of data to be included in an e-mail message.  It also gives
references to remote resources to be collected *if the recipient
has the ability to do so).  This souns complex and, frankly, it
is.  What is means to you is that in a few years' time,
multimedia Internet messages will be the norm.

Back to the present.  If someone sends you attachments today,
they'll usually be uuencoded into the message body.  You need to
save the message into a file, run uudecode (see the documents
that should have come with this utility or ask your system
manager or a friend for help), and the data should be in a file
on your system.

Yours Truly

Signatures are the normal way to close a letter, and many people
have taken to adding text blocks, jokes, or quotes to the end of
their messages.  From our preceding example, the signature part
is

This is a writer with a penchant for literay quotations; others
can be more esoteric, strange, or ribald.  Text blocks often
give postal addresses, telephone numbers, fax numbers, and so
on.  Some e-mail systems enable you to specify which text is to
be auotmatically appended to your messages as standard.

Later in this chapter you'll find the signautre of Scott Yanoff,
who crops up in this book at regular intervals.  It's a good
example of a plain, useful block of data with a little humor
thrown in.

---Navigator's Note:  What for long, complex signatures.  Some
people get very incensed by what they consider to be "a waste of
bandwidth," and some USENET newsgroups reject messages with long
(greater than 4 lines) signatures.

Be carefule if you have a signature that is off-the-wall in any
way.  It may not be appropriate for all of your electronic
correspondence; sending an electronic request for a job
application that ends with a quote from the Marquis de Sade may
not present the impression you would like.

E-Mail Functions

E-mail makes many different functions available to you.  In this
section, we'll explain a few of the most common.

Multiple Receipients

When you send a message, you may want to have multiple
recipients.  Most e-mail programs enable you to specify two or
more addresses.  The limitation on how many people can be
addressed is often the same as the maximum length of the text.

Another feature enables you to send a copy to someone, usually
for their reference.  This is done by adding one or more
addresses to the "cc" (for carbon copy) list.  If you don't want
the recipients to know that you're copying the message to
someone else, you can use the "bcc" (blind carbon copy,
sometimes written as just "bc") line.  No one other than the
individual recipients on the bcc list will know that they have
received copies -- not even the other bcc addressees.

Some people feel that using bcc's is very rude, because it is an
essentially duplicitious act.  I tend to agree, but then I'm
old-fashioned that way.

Folders

Many e-mail applications enable you to store messages in
folders.  This is a way of organizing what can be a huge mass of
messages.  If you subscribe to mailing lists or USENET News,
your e-mail volume can be in the hundreds of messages each day.
Folders make that tidal wave manageable.  Some e-mail systems
even have folders inside folders.

---Navigator's Note:  A good habit to get into is to throw
e-mail away regularly.  If you don't, you'll start to accumulate
truly humongous volumes of data.  Eventually, you either run out
of disk space or get into an argument with your system
administrator.  Remember that once you've read a message, it's
unlikely that you'll ever read it again.  One well-known writer
on the topic of e-mail and the Internal, Marshall Rose, claims
to have every piece of e-mail he has send and received since
1986, totaling around 250 megabytes -- and it's in a compressed
form!  I'm not sure what use this is to him.

Replying

We've already mentioned replying to messages.  This can be done
without providing a reference to the mssage replied to (for
example, just mentioning the original message's subject) or with
a full reference to the original message ID>

The addition of "Re:" is a nice touch.  A few systems copy the
original message's text into the body of the reply so that you
can refer to it.  Most people just copy the bits they want to
refer to.  The standard for these referred-to bits is to put
some kind of marker on the left side of the copied text.  Some
editors, sudh as the UNIX e-mail program, PINE, do that for you.
See the preceding example, where my original text is flagged
with >s.  The alternative, to save yourself the pain of
laboriously adding the markers, is just to delete all the text
you aren't refering to and put quotes around what you keep.

Forwarding

Use forwarding when you want to send a mesage you received to
another user.  Some systems put a note into the body of the
message (along the lines of "Forwarded message"), which you can
delete if you want.

It's also common for e-mail software to copy the header data
from the original message into the body of the forwarded
message.  Again, feel free to delete that data if you think it's
not of any use.

If you ever feel inclined to spread gossip or send aggressive or
rude messages, remember that forwarding a message makes
photocopying a letter look horribly complicated.  The spiteful
quip about a coworker that you think is funny can be forwarded
within seconds of being received if the recipient feels like it.

Address Books

Address books and aliases also help make e-mail easier to use.
Many e-mail ssytems support a feature to "catch" e-mail
addresses from messages received, with the ability to edit in
your own entries.

Having an address such as [e-mail] is not
particularly helpful.  You want to have a more useful name than
that, which is where aliases come in.  This means that instead
of using that long address, [e-mail], you'd
use the alias "Rick Gates" or just "Rick" instead.

Encryption

Encryption is a feature that has many people up in arms.  There
have been suggestions that the U.S. government may make it
illegal to use any encryption for electronic messages other than
one they approve.  They want to control which encryption
standard can be used, so that it will be one they'll be able to
decode "for reasons of national security."

The implications of this have not excapted the civil
libertarians, the activists, and all sorts of interested
parties.  The question raised by many people is, "Why should I
care if the government can read my messages?  I have nothing to
hide."  "Ah," reply those against government control, "it's the
thin end of the wedge.  Let them do that, and they'll be getting
into all sorts of data about you that aren't anyone's business
but yours."

The issue of encryption is, however, really quite complicated.
If you want more information, find the May/June 1993 issue of
Wired (a truly terrific magazine on high-tech topics).  It
contains a greate article on the topic, called "Crypto Rebels."
Wired is published by Wired USA and can be reached  at
[e-mail].

In response to the need for easily available encryption, a
couple of packages are available in he public domain.  One of
the best=known is PGP, which stands for Pretty Good Privacy.
This can't be used legally for bueiness purposes and is at the
center of a potentially big political issue that could well have
a major effrct on the way the Internet is used.

Internet Addresses

As with snail mail, the timely arrival of your electonic message
depends on whether you address it correctly.  Internet addresses
are in two parts, a "domain" name and a user name separated by
an "at" sign (@).

The domain name (more correctly called a hierarchical name)
consists of the name of the machine on wich the user has an
account, along with the network groups and subgroups leading to
that computer.  This name shows the group and sub-groups giving
that machine a unique identification, wich enables the Internet
message routing software to determine where to deliver the
message.  Delivering the message to the addressee is then up to
the names computer.

For example, [e-mail] designates an Internet
address, rjj3432, as the user name.  This user can be found on
the computer shrimp, which is in the subdomain cis, which is in
the subdomain utwo, which is in the domain edu.

Domains are the highest level of addressing on the Internet and
denote the types of activities the machines are used for.   The
most common domain names in use on the Internet are

EDU Education
MIL Military Sites
GOV Nonmilitary Governmental Sites
COM Commercial Organizations
NET Special Network Machines
ORG Other Organizations
UK United Kingdon
CA Canada
AU Australia

...and so on, for all the other countries.

The subdomains can be names of institutions and epartments at
thos institutions.  For example, umass stands for the University
of Massachusetts, pitt is the University of Pittsburgh, and USL
if the University of Southwest Louisiana.

Examples of department names that aren't locational include cis
for computer information services, lis for library information
science, and med for medical center.  Thus, a computer called
"bigbopper" in the computer information services department at
the University of Southwest Louisiana would be
bigbopper.cis.usl.edu.

The computer's name is chosen locally and is often colorful or
thematic.  Some examples of prosaic names are acsbuxa (standing
for "UCSB UNIX A") and ux1 (standing for "UNIX 1").  More
interesting machine names are coyote (at rain.org), cadillac (at
siemens.com), and casbah (at acns.nwu.edu).

---Navigator's Warning:  Addresses can be shortened if the
shortened form is unique.  For example the address
[e-mail] can be shortened to [e-mail].
Alghough you can do this, the best advice is don't.  An
explicit, unshortened address is unlikely to be misinterpreted.
With the incredible rate of expansion of the Internet, chances
are good that a shortened address that works today might not
work tomorrow.

User names can be cryptic.  They may be composed of initials and
identifying numbers; they can be shortened, a nickname or handle
(as in Citizen's Band use...rduck is probably out there
somewhere); or they might be a variation or even the full read
name of the person.  The following are samples of addresses.
Try to decipher them before reading the commentaries to the
right.

Address Comments

[e-mail]   A numeric user name.  This is due to
CompuServe's addressing scheme.

[e-mail] Most likely a handle.

[e-mail] A visitor from Alpha Centauri?  The
computer most likely runs UNIX and is on the BITNET network.

[e-mail]  A full real name of an
Australian user.

[e-mail] Possible a person's last names and
intials.  Whimsical computer name.

[e-mail] A last name for a user at Wright
Patterson Air Force Base, which is in the subdomain "af" -- for
Air Force -- in the domain military.

zxj@vm Brevity taken to extremes.  A shortened address.

Remember that Internet alphanumeric addresses are actually
aliases for numeric addresses, such as 128.5.3.194.  The
alphanumeric addresses are used because, even though they can be
hard to interpret, they are easier than the number names.  The
translation of alphanumeric names into numeric addresses is
handled by machines on the Internet, called name servers.  You
can use either type of address.


Aliases

The get around using the cumbersome Internet address of a person
or persons, many mail programs enable you to create aliases.  An
alias is a substitute for the Internet address.  Thus, if your
friend "Ann" has an Internet address of
[e-mail], you can make the word ann substitute
for the longer address.  This is especially helpful if you want
to send to a group of people -- classmates, colleagues, friends,
coworkers.  You just put all of their e-mail addresses into an
alias that you can remember -- for example, class296, book,
project, party, or staff.

Under the UNIX operating system, you can specify aliases in the
.mailrc file.  By making an entry that starts with the word
"alias," followed by the alias, followed by the text that the
alias stands for, you can have as many aliased addresses as you
like.  Check with your system manager or your manuals to see how
this should be done.  If you don't lay out the entries
correctly, it won't work.

This approach helped with the firt "Navigating the Internet"
workshop (memtioned in the Introductino), which had 860
participants.  Aliases were used, so that instead of having to
send out 864 messages, only 17 messages were required.  Here is
a sample of part of my .mailrc file containing the aliases:


When I ran the second workshop, we had to close the participant
list when it reached 15,000 people.  Without aliases, handling
that many addresses would have been impossible for both me and
the mail program.  Aliases are a real timesaver if you
constantly send e-mail to one person or a group of people.
Finding out how to created aliases in your own e-mail program is
worth your while.


Finding People

Although Internet names may be easuer to remember than the
corresponding Internet nubmer, you're not going to remember many
names without constant use and concentration.

No single, definitive "white pages" service is available for the
Internet.  Besides, the network is so volatile and changing that
guides and listings are outdated soon after they are made
available.  Several tools can be used to find Internet
addresses.  We'll look at three of the most simple to use:
finger, whois, and netfind.

---Navigator's Note:  Under WAIS (see chapter 7, "The Database
of Databases:  WAIS"), we list several directory servers that
you can access.

---Navigator's Note:  If you decide to be flashy and put tricky
stuff in your .plan file, you must ensure that the group "world"
is given "execute" privilege to this file.  This is required
even though, due to the way UNIX works, it's not a program file.
Just because when you finger your own account, you can see the
.plan file contents, don't assume that the world has "execute"
privilege.  You must have execute privilege on your own files,
which is why you can see your own .plan file.


Whois

Whois is a utility that can identify names, titles, or addresses
and return a directory entry, rather like a telephone white
pages.  The chois service is reputed to list over 70,000
Internet users -- a pitifully small fraction of the Internet
popluation but better than nothing.  Whois is now maintained by
AT&T through a service called the InterNIC (see Chapter 10,
"Internet Directory Assistance: InterNIC")>

Whois is simple and can be used by your computer (if you have a
copy of it), by telnet (if you don't) or by e-mail.  The telnet
whois server sites are listed in the directory under xxx.  Of
particular note is nic.ddn.mil.  If you're trying to find
someone in the military, this is the whois server to use.

Use a whois client by typing

whois [-h <whois server name] [username]

On the whole, whois is usually not much use, but it's worth
trying when all else fails.  Whois is starting to be eclipsed by
other, more advanced services that are far more efficient and
comprehensive.

Netfind

Netfind is a white pages service that accesses several databases
for you.  You get to it by telneting to bruno.cs.colorado.edu.
The following session was done from the Delphi Internet Special
Interest Group (SIG) section.  Alghough I used telnet, Delphi
actually has a command that takes you straight to the netfind
server at bruno.cs.colorado.edu.  We'll first look at the help
screens:


Get the idea now?  Basically, you enter a name and whatever part
of the address you know, and off you go.  If you're lucky,
something turns up.  Often nothing does.  This shouldn't really
surprise you when you consider the size of the Internet.
Finding anyone without some hard information is like saying "I
want to find George Smith in North Amierica."  There are many
Smiths, many George Smits, and a significant number of both in
North America.  Moreover, you don't have a single telephone book
to consult -- you have thousands of them.  Finding anyone on the
Internet with very little information about them is very hard,
even for Master Navigators.

Netfind checks the information on the user's last login and the
last computer from whcih mail was read to determine the best
address to send mail to.  Rick ahs three accounts, of which
[e-mail] looks to be the best bet for getting
mail through to him.

Netfind is one of the better and easier white pages servers to
use.  However, you'll find that it often strickes out if the
user's system is new to the Internet, is currently off-line,
doesn't allow external access through the finger command, or
doesn't recognize the name by which you know the user.  Even
with those limitations, it's better than nothing, and it gets an
answer often enough to make it worth the effort.

Online Courses

In the introduction, we mentioned the online course taught by
Rich Smith.  In the summer of 1992, this course was offered over
the Internet, with 50 or 60 participants expected.  In a matter
of days, 864 people had signed up and others were being turned
away.  Thus was "Navigating the Internet:  An Interactive
Workshop" born.  Due to the demand, the course was offered again
in October, and over 15,000 participants from 50 countries
registered.

The potential for ditance education over the Internet is
enormous, using international experts in collaboration in
specific fields or interdisciplinary courses.  Librarians are
making use of their campus-wide information networks for
training faculty and students on use of the Internet and the
library.  On some campuses, faculty already accept student work
assignments by e-mail and hold discussions with distant classes.
This is effectively a paperless course where syllabuses, class
assignments, and final reports are exchanged over the network.

The increased use of sound and video transmissions, particularly
with interactive teaching, will make distance education even
more acceptable.  For busy professionals or people in remote
locations, distance teaching makes continuing education easier.
Combining the Internet with digital multimedia and easy
accessibility makes a revolution in primary, secondary, and
adult education virtually inevitable.


Using E-Mail

Many e-mail systems are available for almost all computer
platforms.  The following is a short glimpse of a basic UNIX
3-mail program that outlines several of the basic e-mail
functions.

Sending E-Mail

After logging onto UNIX, the command line furnishes the user
with a prompt.  On the system I use in the following example, it
is icarus.lis[1]%.  Throught this book you'll see all sorts of
prompts because I have used different systems.

You start the e-mail program by typing the mail command and
entering the recipient's Internet address.  The general form is

mail [username]@[machinename]

The e-mail program then asks for a subject:

icarus.lis[1]% mail [e-mail]
Subject:


---Nagivator's Note:  The length of the subject of en e-mail
message is best limited to short desciptive text relevant to the
message.  "Hi!" as a subject is pretty common, but if the
recipient gets a lot of mail and isn't looking for a message
from you, your message may get handled late or not at all.  The
volume of mail is a big problem for many people, so they use
e-mail because it is so easy to send; if they had to use
conventional mail, they wouldn't bother.  AS you get more
involved with e-mail, you'll find that you get lots of replies
to messages that simply say "Thanks" or "Okay" -- hardly helpful
at all.

You can also start mail and specify the subject.  This is done
with the command format:


mail "[subject]" [username]@[machinename]

Notice that if the subject is more than a single word, the text
must be between double or single quotes.

Next, type in the text of the message, using whatever editor the
system works with.  Sometimes this editor is built into the
3-mail system and may use its own eccentric commands (such as
Ctrl+X to send; who thought of that?!).  Some editors work like
a typewriter:  you must press Enter at the end of each line, and
you can't go up a line to make changes.  You can only go
backwards on the current line to correct errors.  Even that is
tricky and depends on which computer you're using.  The
Backspace key may work to back up and erase errors in some
cases, and Ctrl+H may work in others.  You'll have to practice
with your editor to become proficient in creating long messages.

---Navigator's Note:  It's often easier to use some other editor
to create the mail message in a file and then import the file
into the mssage.  You'll have to check out the documentation for
your e-mail system to see if the built-in editor is any good
and, if not, how to import text from a file.

If you botch the e-mail message to the point of embarrassment
(as is very easy with the more primitive editors), Ctrl+C
normally cancels the e-mail message.  Ctrl+D sends the message.
In some cases, you are prompted with cc, which means you could
put in another Internet address to send a carbon copy to.

You can send an e-mail message in other ways.  In UNIX< you can
send a file by starting mail with a different command format:

mail -s "[subject]" [username]@[machinename] <[filename]

This takes the contents of the file, [filename], and sends it to
the mail program as if you were typing it.  This is a technique
called piping and will be discussed in your system manual.

You can send a file by entering -r on a blank line followed by
the filename.  This means "I want to send a file and here comes
its name."

-r test
"test" 160/6661

E-mail programs enable you to compose and send a message or file
in many other ways.  You'll have to read the documentation of
your e-mail program to discover all its features.

Receiving E-Mail

When you log onto a UNIX machine, you often get a message
telling you that you have mail waiting.  This is usually in the
form "you have mail" or "you have new mail".


To read your mail, start the mail program by typing the command
mail at the system prompt.  In this example, the UNIX prompt
changes from bss> to the mail & (ampersand) prompt.  The mail
program lists the sender, the date the mssage was sent, the
number of lines and characters in the message (as in 64/1662),
and the subject of the mail messages.  You can now read, reply,
save, edit, or delete mail messages.  The greater-than sign (>)
points to the current mail item, and the U at the beginning of
each e-mail message means that the message is unread.

Help

To help you remember the mail commands, a short description of
each is available online.  Entering ? or the word help at the
mail & prompt displays the help text:


Common E-Mail Commands

Following is a selection of commands that most e-mail programs
support.  You'll need to refer to the manuals for your system to
find out what commands are available for your e-mail program.

Headers

To see the partial headers of the messages again, enter h at the
mail prompt.  These are not the full headers we discussed
earlier -- just the originator's name and address, the time the
message was sent, and the subject.

Read

To read a message, type t or p and the number of the message you
want to read.  If you just press Enter, the current message is
displayed (remember, the current message is signified by a
greater-than sign on the far right).  You can also type the
number of the message by itself.

Reply

You can reply to any e-mail message in two ways from the mail
program:  R replies to the sender and all others who have
received the message, whereas r replies to the sender only.

---Navigator's Warning:  Standard UNIX programs have a lot of
strange key usage (strance, at least, to X-windows, Microsoft
Windows, and Mac users).  Many commands, as we've jsut
discussed, are case sensitive, and using the wrong case can give
you the wrong results and make you grind your teeth.  Worse
still, the results might be different from, or even the opposite
of, what you want, depending on the version of UNIX you're
using.  Read your help screens and manuals carefully.


Save

You can save messages by typing s, followed by the number or
numbers of the messages you want to save, followed by a filename
to save them to.  Typing s 1-3 oldmail.txt saves messages 1, 2,
and 3 to the designated file.  s 1 2 3 does the same thing if
you've already specified a filename during the current session
with the e-mail system.  When the file already exists, the
messages are appended to it.


Delete and Undelete

Deleting a message marks it for erasure when you quite the
e-mail session.  Use the delete command, d, followed by the
number or numbers of the messages you want to delete.  If you
delete a file by mistake, you can use the undelete command, u,
to get the mssages back.  However, once you quite the mail
program, all messages marked for deletion are gone forever.

Quit

Typing the letter q leaves the mail program.  Unread messages
are saved, and you can read them when you run the mail program
again.  Read messages are saved in a file called mbox, and
deleted files are erased and lost for good.  The other way to
leave this mail program is to type the letter x, which quits the
mail program abut leaves everything as if you never ran it.  All
deleted files are recovered, and read files are not transferred
to the mbox file.  The only exception is that any files you
saved mail messages into will still exist.

What If I Want to Send a File That Isn't Just Plain Text?

(Boy, you ask long questions.)  So far, we've assumed that all
the files you want to send are regular ASCII text files.  Binary
files, such as graphics, audio, and many word processing files
(for instance, Microsoft Word or WordPerfect if they're not
saved as text or postscript) must be prepared for sending by
e-mail by encoding them as we discussed previously.  Encoding
programs take binary files and format them to plain ASCII text.

The receiver of the e-mail must then decode them so that they
make sense.  UNIX has uuencode and uudecode to do this job.
Uuencode is available for several operating systems.  Several
other encoding software programs are available free over the
Internet; use Archie to locate them.


E-Mail and the Internet

E-mail is an incredible tool.  It can keep you in touch with
friends and business colleagues no matter where they are
physically.  It can be used to send and receive files as well as
interact with other services (as we'll discuss in the section on
ftpmail in Chapter 4, "A Moving Experience: FTP for Me") and to
access Archie (as we'll cover in Chapter 6, "Finding Files:
Archie").  Equally important, e-mail can connect with discussion
groups (as we'll see in Chapters 12, "Views and News: USENET,"
and 13, "Getting on the List:  LISTSERV").

Just to show that we've gotten you interested in using
electronic mail, drop us a line and tell us what e-mail systems
you use, what you like and hate about e-mail, and what
interesting things have happened to you through e-mail.  Our
addresses are

Rich Smith [e-mail]
Mark Gibbs [e-mail]
[e-mail]

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