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How to send and receive e-mail

To send e-mail to someone, you need to know their e-mail address. This normally consists of their username followed by the name of the computer that their mail account is on. If you wish to mail another member of SUCS, then you only need to type their username. If you want to e-mail someone else, then you'll have to use the full address. If you want to send mail to someone who's at Swansea University, then you can use the e-mail directory to look them up.

The SUCS machines have a variety of mail packages you can use:

Mail
The most basic is the 'mail' command. Just typing mail will allow you to check your mail; typing mail e-mail@address will allow you to start composing an e-mail (where e-mail@address is the address of the person you want to send the message to). You will be prompted for a subject. When you press ENTER, you can start typing your message. When you have finished, press ENTER, and put a dot ('.') on the new line. Pressing ENTER again will finish the message, and send it.

Elm
This is a more sophisticated mail package that allows you to manage your mail, read and reply to it and compose new messages. More details are available by typing man elm at the UNIX prompt.

Pine
This is another mail package, which works in a similar way to Elm, with a text menu interface. Pine can be run by simply typing pine at the UNIX prompt. Online help is available within Pine.

If you want to abort sending a letter type ^C (Press Ctrl and C) twice. If you do abort sending a letter, the mail program will put the text that you have entered so far in a file called dead.letter which you can then either delete (using the command rm) or keep.

Once you have finished the body of you letter, you may be prompted for further input which may look something like CC:, if so, ignore it and press return until you get the UNIX prompt back. For furthur information on the mail program you can look in the online manual. Also you could try using the elm program which may be on some of our computers and provides many more complicated functions.

How to read e-mail

Every time you login to the computer, you will be told if there is any mail waiting for you, if so type:
mail This command will respond "No Mail", if there is no mail for you or it will allow you to read you messages. Type the message number and press return to read the message, other commands you can do from this program include:
d Delete a message
s Save message in a file
q Quit the mail program
There are also other more complex mail programs as mentioned above, and these can format the messages in ways that are easier to use. Find out about "elm" and "pine" if you are interested in this.
Computer Society Guides / Steve Whitehouse / SteveW@ACM.org
13/10/1997