Email and Newsgroups

What is email?

Email is short for Electronic Mail and has importance approaching that of the telephone.  This year alone, Bill Clinton has mentionned how he'd like everyone in the United States to have an email address ( I'll abstain from sarcasm at this point but needless to say email's importance is quite unquestionable ).  Imagine the old fashion idea of sending mail; you write a letter, give sufficient postage, mail it at the post office.  Within a few days ( sometimes weeks, sometimes never ) the letter will arrive at the person addressed.  They'll act surprised, read your letter, blah, blah.  

Analagous to the archaic form of communication, with email you can send a letter electronically ( without postage ) to a friend who must also have an email account.   Instead of taking weeks, the electronic letter reaches in a matter of minutes ( sometimes less, sometimes never ).  And there you have it, email explained...   Okay, there are little things like attachments, file formats, UUencoding, base64 encoding, forwarding, spam, etc. to learn about but the analogy remains correct.  At SOCS, if you are taking a Computer Science course, you will have an email account made for you.  All you have to do is access it and use it wisely ( i.e. follow the Code of Conduct concerning computing at SOCS ).

Pine

The simple solution to reading email and newsgroups is PinePine is a Washington University product designed to make email and newsgroups easy to use.   The very fact of ease of use ( not to mention lack of command line capabilities   ) annoys the hell out of "expert" users of other email programs such as mush, mutt, and mail.  Basically Pine is menu driven simplicity.  Most commands available to you are listed at the bottom of the screen where you just hit the proper "ctrl + key" to get the desired choice.   Need I say more?  Well, there really is no reason to.  If you understand the terminology used in emailing and reading newsgroups Pine lines up your options for you.  There is, of course, a man page for Pine not to mention the help menus within the Pine program.  To read the man page:

%man pine

To read the help utility within Pine

%pine

and from within Pine type '?'.

Mush

 

Mail

The program can usually be found in most versions of Unix and allows the user to check their mail via command line.  Mail by default looks in the system directory ( /var/spool/mail ) for a file titled with the username.  The user can change the location where mail normally looks for incoming messages by changing the MAIL environment variable.  To start mail, from the Linux command line type:

%mail

The file .mailrc, found in the your home directory, allows users to specify configuration settings for mail.

From the mail command line the contents of your current inbox is displayed to you.   From here you have a variety of commands available.  For instance, if you had 15 messages, typing '3' will bring up the 3rd message on the list.  At the mail command prompt hitting 'enter' will bring up the first message on the list.  You have the option of editing messages, replying to authors, replying to mailing groups, forwarding mail, etc.  From the command prompt there are options to set the recipient, to set the subject, etc.  There is an extensive list of options available and I have to do the evil of referring you to the man pages concerning mail for the complete set of options.  To get the man page on mail, from the command line type:

% man mail

Connecting to get your mail

Why go to the lab just to read your mail?  If you have a computer with an internet connection then you can read your mail outside of the labs.  You will need a mail program that supports POP / IMAP and SMTP such as Eudora, Microsoft Outlook, Netscape Mail, etc.  Within these programs if you wish to connect to Computer Science mail servers you will have to set the incoming mail to be received from the server po-box.mcgill.ca and outgoing mail to be sent to mailhost.cs.mcgill.ca.  By downloading your mail to your personal computer you save space on your local account and on your network mail account. 

Terminogy,  Do's and Don'ts

Here is some terminology necessary when using email or newsgroups:

 

Newsgroup and Newsreaders