Electronic Mail

Students may communicate between themselves, and with UNE staff, via electronic mail (email). It is possible to setup your email to work from your home computer but we will not cover this in these notes. We will instead look at several email programs available to you on UNE systems. The most commonly used email programs used are:

mutt

A powerful menu driven mailer program that replaces the aging elm program. This program used the vi editor, by default, to compose messages.

pine

A simple-to-use menu driven mailer program. This program uses the pico editor, by default, to compose messages.

elm

Another simple-to-use menu driven mailer program. This program uses the vi editor, by default, to compose messages. This program has been popular in the past but has not been upgraded for several years. As a result it does not handle attachments and other new features very well. mutt is a better program to use now.

mail

A simple, but not easy, command driven mailer program. Quite dated but can be useful sometimes, especially from within other program.

Which mailer you use is up to you. If you like the vi editor then use mutt, if not, use pine. The mail program is useful in that it is the standard Unix mailer that comes on all Unix systems. Some knowledge of it can come in handy sometimes.

Sending Mail

To send mail to someone you must know their email address. If you are on the same machine as the person you want to send to, then the address is simply their username (or login name). If the person's username is on another machine then the email address must include the name of the machine For example anne@turing.une.edu.au

A file is sent very easily using the elm or mail program. Prepare the file using vi or some similar means. Send the file as follows:

turing % mail username < file

This is a convenient method of sending a program that you may be having trouble with to your tutor and asking for their assistance.

You may also enter the text of the message directly into the mail program, ending with a line with just . on it. For example:

turing % mail username
Here is the text
of the message. Press <Return> at
the end of each line
.

The mutt and pine programs are menu-driven programs with additional features, such as forwarding and replying to mail. Some may find it easier to use than the mail program. To send a message using elm or pine just type elm or pine then select the mailing option and enter your message. You may also include a prepared file, using editor commands, while composing your message.

Receiving Mail

Mail messages are usually stored in a `mailbox' for you. They may be read, filed, deleted or simply left in the mailbox. Because of the added features of elm and pine, its probably best to use one of these for reading mail.

Type mutt or pine then select the message you want to deal with and the option you prefer e.g. read, file, delete, reply, etc. Both these programs also allow you to store your mail messages in `folders' under your home directory. On UNE systems (particularly metz), you may have to be careful how much you store in your home directory. Disk quotas will limit how much space you can use. Use the quota command to see how much of your quota you are using.

Caution: metz has quotas on your system mailbox as well as your home directory. Therefore, your system mailbox can go over quota because you have too many messages. If this happens, you may loose messages. For this reason you should be careful to delete any messages you don't want to keep from your system mailbox.

Redirecting Mail

If you prefer to read your email on a different machine to turing, you can redirect all messages to your other email account. To do this you need to create a file in your home directory, on turing, called .forward which contains the email address you want your mail forwarded to.

Be careful not to setup forwarding loops. For example, don't redirect your metz email to turing, your turing email to your ISP and your ISP to metz. You will loose your email if you do things like this.

Reading your Mail from a WWW Browser

turing (and metz) can act as POP¹⁶servers. Simply use your browser's option to make turing a POP server. Use your turing username and password. This will allow you to read your turing mail.

The use of turing as an SMTP¹⁷ server to send mail however, is not generally supported. It will work if you use the UNE modems but will not work in general from another ISP account. It is required to be like this so that so called `spammers' and other email abusers don't use turing as a relay host.

If you want to send mail via your browser, you will need to use your ISP's server.