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Electronic mail, or “e-mail” , for short, is an important part of the ODU CS environment. Besides being a useful way to exchange personal messages, e-mail is used by the Department for official announcements. Many instructors distribute grades by e-mail. They may send hints and corrections for projects and assignments that way, or distribute special files needed by all students in the class. E-mail may be the best way to pose a short question to your instructor outside of class, since you don't actually need to catch your instructor in person at a time when he/she's not busy with someone else.
Of course, you may already have an e-mail account at work, with the University, or at home via your own Internet Service Provider (ISP). But you can't just ignore your departmental e-mail account. You will either need to read it on a regular basis, or, if you prefer to receive all your mail at another account, you can set a forwarding address for your Departmental e-mail. If you have a favorite email program that you run on your home PC, you can configure that program to fetch mail from your Unix account.
Just as with physical mail, you can't send someone e-mail unless you know their name and address. For e-mail, the name and address are usually combined as
For example, my login name is “zeil” , and my mail is handled by the machine “cs.odu.edu” , so my e-mail address is zeil@cs.odu.edu.
Actually all e-mail for CS Dept. login accounts is handled by cs.odu.edu. When you are sending mail to a user with the same mail handling machine, you can omit the “@” and everything that follows it. So if you are logged in to a CS Dept machine and want to send me e-mail you could just send it to zeil. But if you are logged in to a Teletechnet PC or a machine elsewhere on the Internet, you would need to give the full form, zeil@cs.odu.edu.
There are several programs that you can use to get e-mail, and people tend to become rather fanatical about their personal favorite. The most basic of these is the Unix mail command, which also has the advantage of being universally available on any Unix machine. mail is described in Section 5.1.3: The Unix mail command.
The mail command, however, is showing its age. When it was developed, all e-mail was plain-text only. As time passed, however, people found it convenient to package files, graphics, sounds, etc., as part of an “extended” e-mail message. The international standard defining the format of Internet e-mail was eventually extended (the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME for short) to allow almost any file to be attached to a plain-text message. The mail command predates these new standards and so cannot handle MIME e-mail. Also, mail is not the easiest e-mail program to learn.
The ODU CS Department provides a simple web-based interface to Unix email. From the CS Dept. home page, look under “Online Services” and select “Squirrel Mail” .
Another good alternative is the program pine, discussed in this lesson. It is menu-driven, includes a substantial built-in help system, and can process and send MIME mail.
Later, you may want to check out the X-Windows mailtool or the M-x vm command for reading e-mail from within the emacs editor.
The Unix mail command is described here. This is one of the oldest programs for accessing email, and it shows its age. I don't know anyone who actually uses this to read their normal email. It is worth knowing, though, because it can be used entirely from the command line with no interaction. This makes it useful when writing scripts, where you might want to automatically send an email as part of a programmed action. For example, I have a script that runs automatically every night to rebuild the tables used by the “Search” command on the course website. If something goes wrong, it sends me an email with the relevant error message.
To send mail to someone with e-mail address addr, give the command
For example, you could send me mail via the command
After you have given the mail command, you will be prompted for a subject line to indicate what your message is about. After that, you begin typing your message on the next line. When you are done, type ^D on a line by itself. You will then be prompted with “Cc:” , which allows you to add the login names of other people to whom you would like to send a copy of your message. (Many people like to make a habit of cc'ing a copy to themselves.) If you do not want to send any extra copies, just hit the “Return” key. Your message will then be sent.
As you type your message, you can send special instructions to the mail program by entering any of the following at the start of a line:
When you first log in, you will be informed if you have received e-mail. At that time, or anytime thereafter, you can use the frm command to list the messages awaiting.
To actually read your mail, give the command mailx with no arguments. You should see a numbered list of your messages. If not, the command “h” (for headers) will list them. You can then read a message by typing it's number.33
After reading the message, you can take any of several actions:
You don't have to use any Unix program to retrieve your Unix account e-mail. Almost any email program can be configured to fetch mail from your Unix account.
The world of email is dominated by three communications standards:
A complicating factor is that most Internet Service Providers block SMTP traffic that goes anywhere except to their own mail servers. This is pretty much a necessary restriction to prevent spammers from flooding the net from any arbitrary internet account. But it really makes it tricky to configure an email program on a laptop or other portable machine that may be moved from one ISP to another on a regular basis. That's one reason why email programs that run on remote machines and can be accessed via a web interface are becoming increasingly popular.
If, however, you use a program like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, or any of the other common email applications, you can configure it to fetch your CS Dept Unix email. The exact steps to be follwed will depend on the program and should be covered in the program's help files or documentation. But the general outline is
If you prefer to read your e-mail on a different system, you can easily tell the Unix mailing system to forward all mail sent to your Unix e-mail address to a different address.
You will want to create, in your home directory (i.e., cd ~) a file named “.forward” . The contents of this file should be a single line of text containing your preferred e-mail address.
You can create this file using your favorite text editor, or you can simply use the Unix echo command to write the desired text into the file. For example, if you wanted all your e-mail to be sent to bogus@megacorp.com, you would do the following
The final cat command should show the contents of the .forward file to be your desired address. (Note: Unix files that start with a “.” are invisible to the normal ls command. To see them in a directory listing, you have to add the -a option: ls -a.)
Now, test it out! If you have a bad e-mail address in your .forward file, you could lose messages. So send yourself mail (to your ODU CS account). It should appear, in due course, at your preferred e-mail address. How long it actually takes depends on many factors. It may take only a few minutes. If after a few hours, you have not received the e-mail, delete your .forward file. Try again, if you wish. Or you might try on another day just in case the CS Dept. mail server, or the one at your preferred site, was temporarily out of commission. If you have repeated problems getting mail forwarded quickly, you might want to rethink your desire to use this feature. For most people, this procedure works without much trouble.
You can actually have more than one forwarding address. The .forward file can contain a comma-separated list of forwarding addresses. For example, you might use
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