Electronic mail is one of the most popular things one can do on the
Internet. In 1998, it was reported that more electronic mail was sent
than regular mail. It is indeed common and useful.
Under Slackware, we provide a standard mail server, and several mail
clients. All of the clients discussed are text-based. A lot of Windows
users may be against this, but you will find that a text based client is
very convienent, especially when checking mail remotely.
pine(1) is not elm. Or so the saying
goes. The University of Washington created their program for Internet news
and email out of a need for an easy mail reader for their students.
pine is one of the most popular email clients in use today
and is available for nearly every flavor of
Unix and even
Windows.
You will see a menu of commands and a row of command keys at the bottom.
pine is indeed a complex program, so we will not discuss
every feature about it here.
To see what's in your inbox, type i. Your messages are
listed with their date, author, and subject. Highlight the message you want
and press enter to view it. Pressing r will
start a reply to the message. Once you have written the response, type
Ctrl+X to send it. You can press i to
get back to the message listing.
If you want to delete a message, press d. It will mark the
highlighted message for deletion. pine deletes the mail
when you exit the program. pine also lets you store your
mail in folders. You can get a listing of folders by pressing
l. At the message listing, press s to save
it to another folder. It will ask for the folder name to write the message to.
pine offers many, many features; you should definitely
have a look at the man page for more information. It will contain the latest
information about the program.
elm(1) is another popular text-based email client. Though
not quite as user friendly as pine, it's definitely been
around a lot longer.
By default, you are placed in your inbox. The messages are listed with
the message number, date, sender, and subject. Use the arrow keys to
highlight the message you want. Press Enter to read the message.
To compose a new message, type m at the main screen. The
d key will flag a message for deletion. And the
r key will reply to the current message you are reading. All
of these keys are displayed at the bottom of the screen with a prompt.
The man page discusses elm in more detail, so you will
probably want to consult that before using elm.
mailx(1) is a command line driven mail client. It is very
primitive and offers pretty much nothing in the way of user interfaces.
However, mailx is handy for times when you need to quickly
mail something, scripting a bulk mailer, or something similar.
The basic command line is:
$ mailx -s <subject> <to-addr> |
mailx reads the message body from standard input. So you
can cat a file into this command to mail it, or you can just type text and hit
ctrl+D when finished with the message.
Here is an example of mailing a program source file to another person.
$ cat randomfunc.c | mailx -s "Here's that function" \
asdf@example.net |
The man page explains more of what mailx can do, so you
will probably want to have a look at that before using it.