Copyright (c) 1980, 1993
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
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documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
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THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
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IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
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DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
SUCH DAMAGE.
@(#)mail4.nr 8.1 (Berkeley) 6/8/93
.bp .sh 1 "More about sending mail" .sh 2 "Tilde escapes" .pp While typing in a message to be sent to others, it is often useful to be able to invoke the text editor on the partial message, print the message, execute a shell command, or do some other auxiliary function. .i Mail provides these capabilities through .i "tilde escapes" , which consist of a tilde (~) at the beginning of a line, followed by a single character which indicates the function to be performed. For example, to print the text of the message so far, use: .(l ~p .)l which will print a line of dashes, the recipients of your message, and the text of the message so far. Since .i Mail requires two consecutive \s-2RUBOUT\s0's to abort a letter, you can use a single \s-2RUBOUT\s0 to abort the output of ~p or any other ~ escape without killing your letter. .pp If you are dissatisfied with the message as it stands, you can invoke the text editor on it using the escape .(l ~e .)l which causes the message to be copied into a temporary file and an instance of the editor to be spawned. After modifying the message to your satisfaction, write it out and quit the editor. .i Mail will respond by typing .(l (continue) .)l after which you may continue typing text which will be appended to your message, or type <control-d> to end the message. A standard text editor is provided by .i Mail . You can override this default by setting the valued option .q EDITOR to something else. For example, you might prefer: .(l set EDITOR=/usr/bin/ex .)l .pp Many systems offer a screen editor as an alternative to the standard text editor, such as the .i vi editor from UC Berkeley. To use the screen, or .i visual editor, on your current message, you can use the escape, .(l ~v .)l ~v works like ~e, except that the screen editor is invoked instead. A default screen editor is defined by .i Mail . If it does not suit you, you can set the valued option .q VISUAL to the path name of a different editor. .pp It is often useful to be able to include the contents of some file in your message; the escape .(l ~r filename .)l is provided for this purpose, and causes the named file to be appended to your current message. .i Mail complains if the file doesn't exist or can't be read. If the read is successful, the number of lines and characters appended to your message is printed, after which you may continue appending text. The filename may contain shell metacharacters like * and ? which are expanded according to the conventions of your shell. .pp As a special case of ~r, the escape .(l ~d .)l reads in the file .q dead.letter in your home directory. This is often useful since .i Mail copies the text of your message there when you abort a message with \s-2RUBOUT\s0. .pp To save the current text of your message on a file you may use the .(l ~w filename .)l escape. .i Mail will print out the number of lines and characters written to the file, after which you may continue appending text to your message. Shell metacharacters may be used in the filename, as in ~r and are expanded with the conventions of your shell. .pp If you are sending mail from within .i Mail's command mode you can read a message sent to you into the message you are constructing with the escape: .(l ~m 4 .)l which will read message 4 into the current message, shifted right by one tab stop. You can name any non-deleted message, or list of messages. Messages can also be forwarded without shifting by a tab stop with ~f. This is the usual way to forward a message. .pp If, in the process of composing a message, you decide to add additional people to the list of message recipients, you can do so with the escape .(l ~t name1 name2 ... .)l You may name as few or many additional recipients as you wish. Note that the users originally on the recipient list will still receive the message; you cannot remove someone from the recipient list with ~t. .pp If you wish, you can associate a subject with your message by using the escape .(l ~s Arbitrary string of text .)l which replaces any previous subject with .q "Arbitrary string of text." The subject, if given, is sent near the top of the message prefixed with .q "Subject:" You can see what the message will look like by using ~p. .pp For political reasons, one occasionally prefers to list certain people as recipients of carbon copies of a message rather than direct recipients. The escape .(l ~c name1 name2 ... .)l adds the named people to the .q "Cc:" list, similar to ~t. Again, you can execute ~p to see what the message will look like. .pp The escape .(l ~b name1 name2 ... .)l adds the named people to the .q "Cc:" list, but does not make the names visible in the .q "Cc:" line ("blind" carbon copy). .pp The recipients of the message together constitute the .q "To:" field, the subject the .q "Subject:" field, and the carbon copies the .q "Cc:" field. If you wish to edit these in ways impossible with the ~t, ~s, ~c and ~b escapes, you can use the escape .(l ~h .)l which prints .q "To:" followed by the current list of recipients and leaves the cursor (or printhead) at the end of the line. If you type in ordinary characters, they are appended to the end of the current list of recipients. You can also use your erase character to erase back into the list of recipients, or your kill character to erase them altogether. Thus, for example, if your erase and kill characters are the standard (on printing terminals) # and @ symbols, .(l ~h To: root kurt####bill .)l would change the initial recipients .q "root kurt" to .q "root bill." When you type a newline, .i Mail advances to the .q "Subject:" field, where the same rules apply. Another newline brings you to the .q "Cc:" field, which may be edited in the same fashion. Another newline brings you to the .q "Bcc:" ("blind" carbon copy) field, which follows the same rules as the "Cc:" field. Another newline leaves you appending text to the end of your message. You can use ~p to print the current text of the header fields and the body of the message. .pp To effect a temporary escape to the shell, the escape .(l ~!command .)l is used, which executes .i command and returns you to mailing mode without altering the text of your message. If you wish, instead, to filter the body of your message through a shell command, then you can use .(l ~|command .)l which pipes your message through the command and uses the output as the new text of your message. If the command produces no output, .i Mail assumes that something is amiss and retains the old version of your message. A frequently-used filter is the command .i fmt , designed to format outgoing mail. .pp To effect a temporary escape to .i Mail command mode instead, you can use the .(l ~:Mail command .)l escape. This is especially useful for retyping the message you are replying to, using, for example: .(l ~:t .)l It is also useful for setting options and modifying aliases. .pp If you wish abort the current message, you can use the escape .(l ~q .)l This will terminate the current message and return you to the shell (or Mail if you were using the mail command). If the save option is set, the message will be copied to the file .q dead.letter in your home directory. .pp If you wish (for some reason) to send a message that contains a line beginning with a tilde, you must double it. Thus, for example, .(l ~~This line begins with a tilde. .)l sends the line .(l ~This line begins with a tilde. .)l .pp Finally, the escape .(l ~? .)l prints out a brief summary of the available tilde escapes. .pp On some terminals (particularly ones with no lower case) tilde's are difficult to type. .i Mail allows you to change the escape character with the .q escape option. For example, I set .(l set escape=] .)l and use a right bracket instead of a tilde. If I ever need to send a line beginning with right bracket, I double it, just as for ~. Changing the escape character removes the special meaning of ~. .sh 2 "Network access" .pp This section describes how to send mail to people on other machines. Recall that sending to a plain login name sends mail to that person on your machine. If your machine is directly (or sometimes, even, indirectly) connected to the Arpanet, you can send messages to people on the Arpanet using a name of the form .(l name@host.domain .)l where .i name is the login name of the person you're trying to reach, .i host is the name of the machine on the Arpanet, and .i domain is the higher-level scope within which the hostname is known, e.g. EDU (for educational institutions), COM (for commercial entities), GOV (for governmental agencies), ARPA for many other things, BITNET or CSNET for those networks. .pp If your recipient logs in on a machine connected to yours by UUCP (the Bell Laboratories supplied network that communicates over telephone lines), sending mail can be a bit more complicated. You must know the list of machines through which your message must travel to arrive at his site. So, if his machine is directly connected to yours, you can send mail to him using the syntax: .(l host!name .)l where, again, .i host is the name of the machine and .i name is the login name. If your message must go through an intermediary machine first, you must use the syntax: .(l intermediary!host!name .)l and so on. It is actually a feature of UUCP that the map of all the systems in the network is not known anywhere (except where people decide to write it down for convenience). Talk to your system administrator about good ways to get places; the .i uuname command will tell you systems whose names are recognized, but not which ones are frequently called or well-connected. .pp When you use the .b reply command to respond to a letter, there is a problem of figuring out the names of the users in the .q "To:" and .q "Cc:" lists .i "relative to the current machine" . If the original letter was sent to you by someone on the local machine, then this problem does not exist, but if the message came from a remote machine, the problem must be dealt with. .i Mail uses a heuristic to build the correct name for each user relative to the local machine. So, when you .b reply to remote mail, the names in the .q "To:" and .q "Cc:" lists may change somewhat. .sh 2 "Special recipients" .pp As described previously, you can send mail to either user names or .b alias names. It is also possible to send messages directly to files or to programs, using special conventions. If a recipient name has a `/' in it or begins with a `+', it is assumed to be the path name of a file into which to send the message. If the file already exists, the message is appended to the end of the file. If you want to name a file in your current directory (ie, one for which a `/' would not usually be needed) you can precede the name with `./' So, to send mail to the file .q memo in the current directory, you can give the command: .(l % Mail ./memo .)l If the name begins with a `+,' it is expanded into the full path name of the folder name in your folder directory. This ability to send mail to files can be used for a variety of purposes, such as maintaining a journal and keeping a record of mail sent to a certain group of users. The second example can be done automatically by including the full pathname of the record file in the .b alias command for the group. Using our previous .b alias example, you might give the command: .(l alias project sam sally steve susan /usr/project/mail_record .)l Then, all mail sent to "project" would be saved on the file .q /usr/project/mail_record as well as being sent to the members of the project. This file can be examined using .i "Mail -f" . .pp It is sometimes useful to send mail directly to a program, for example one might write a project billboard program and want to access it using .i Mail . To send messages to the billboard program, one can send mail to the special name `|billboard' for example. .i Mail treats recipient names that begin with a `|' as a program to send the mail to. An .b alias can be set up to reference a `|' prefaced name if desired. .i Caveats : the shell treats `|' specially, so it must be quoted on the command line. Also, the `| program' must be presented as a single argument to mail. The safest course is to surround the entire name with double quotes. This also applies to usage in the .b alias command. For example, if we wanted to alias `rmsgs' to `rmsgs -s' we would need to say: .(l alias rmsgs "| rmsgs -s" .)l
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
SUCH DAMAGE.
@(#)mail4.nr 8.1 (Berkeley) 6/8/93
.bp .sh 1 "More about sending mail" .sh 2 "Tilde escapes" .pp While typing in a message to be sent to others, it is often useful to be able to invoke the text editor on the partial message, print the message, execute a shell command, or do some other auxiliary function. .i Mail provides these capabilities through .i "tilde escapes" , which consist of a tilde (~) at the beginning of a line, followed by a single character which indicates the function to be performed. For example, to print the text of the message so far, use: .(l ~p .)l which will print a line of dashes, the recipients of your message, and the text of the message so far. Since .i Mail requires two consecutive \s-2RUBOUT\s0's to abort a letter, you can use a single \s-2RUBOUT\s0 to abort the output of ~p or any other ~ escape without killing your letter. .pp If you are dissatisfied with the message as it stands, you can invoke the text editor on it using the escape .(l ~e .)l which causes the message to be copied into a temporary file and an instance of the editor to be spawned. After modifying the message to your satisfaction, write it out and quit the editor. .i Mail will respond by typing .(l (continue) .)l after which you may continue typing text which will be appended to your message, or type <control-d> to end the message. A standard text editor is provided by .i Mail . You can override this default by setting the valued option .q EDITOR to something else. For example, you might prefer: .(l set EDITOR=/usr/bin/ex .)l .pp Many systems offer a screen editor as an alternative to the standard text editor, such as the .i vi editor from UC Berkeley. To use the screen, or .i visual editor, on your current message, you can use the escape, .(l ~v .)l ~v works like ~e, except that the screen editor is invoked instead. A default screen editor is defined by .i Mail . If it does not suit you, you can set the valued option .q VISUAL to the path name of a different editor. .pp It is often useful to be able to include the contents of some file in your message; the escape .(l ~r filename .)l is provided for this purpose, and causes the named file to be appended to your current message. .i Mail complains if the file doesn't exist or can't be read. If the read is successful, the number of lines and characters appended to your message is printed, after which you may continue appending text. The filename may contain shell metacharacters like * and ? which are expanded according to the conventions of your shell. .pp As a special case of ~r, the escape .(l ~d .)l reads in the file .q dead.letter in your home directory. This is often useful since .i Mail copies the text of your message there when you abort a message with \s-2RUBOUT\s0. .pp To save the current text of your message on a file you may use the .(l ~w filename .)l escape. .i Mail will print out the number of lines and characters written to the file, after which you may continue appending text to your message. Shell metacharacters may be used in the filename, as in ~r and are expanded with the conventions of your shell. .pp If you are sending mail from within .i Mail's command mode you can read a message sent to you into the message you are constructing with the escape: .(l ~m 4 .)l which will read message 4 into the current message, shifted right by one tab stop. You can name any non-deleted message, or list of messages. Messages can also be forwarded without shifting by a tab stop with ~f. This is the usual way to forward a message. .pp If, in the process of composing a message, you decide to add additional people to the list of message recipients, you can do so with the escape .(l ~t name1 name2 ... .)l You may name as few or many additional recipients as you wish. Note that the users originally on the recipient list will still receive the message; you cannot remove someone from the recipient list with ~t. .pp If you wish, you can associate a subject with your message by using the escape .(l ~s Arbitrary string of text .)l which replaces any previous subject with .q "Arbitrary string of text." The subject, if given, is sent near the top of the message prefixed with .q "Subject:" You can see what the message will look like by using ~p. .pp For political reasons, one occasionally prefers to list certain people as recipients of carbon copies of a message rather than direct recipients. The escape .(l ~c name1 name2 ... .)l adds the named people to the .q "Cc:" list, similar to ~t. Again, you can execute ~p to see what the message will look like. .pp The escape .(l ~b name1 name2 ... .)l adds the named people to the .q "Cc:" list, but does not make the names visible in the .q "Cc:" line ("blind" carbon copy). .pp The recipients of the message together constitute the .q "To:" field, the subject the .q "Subject:" field, and the carbon copies the .q "Cc:" field. If you wish to edit these in ways impossible with the ~t, ~s, ~c and ~b escapes, you can use the escape .(l ~h .)l which prints .q "To:" followed by the current list of recipients and leaves the cursor (or printhead) at the end of the line. If you type in ordinary characters, they are appended to the end of the current list of recipients. You can also use your erase character to erase back into the list of recipients, or your kill character to erase them altogether. Thus, for example, if your erase and kill characters are the standard (on printing terminals) # and @ symbols, .(l ~h To: root kurt####bill .)l would change the initial recipients .q "root kurt" to .q "root bill." When you type a newline, .i Mail advances to the .q "Subject:" field, where the same rules apply. Another newline brings you to the .q "Cc:" field, which may be edited in the same fashion. Another newline brings you to the .q "Bcc:" ("blind" carbon copy) field, which follows the same rules as the "Cc:" field. Another newline leaves you appending text to the end of your message. You can use ~p to print the current text of the header fields and the body of the message. .pp To effect a temporary escape to the shell, the escape .(l ~!command .)l is used, which executes .i command and returns you to mailing mode without altering the text of your message. If you wish, instead, to filter the body of your message through a shell command, then you can use .(l ~|command .)l which pipes your message through the command and uses the output as the new text of your message. If the command produces no output, .i Mail assumes that something is amiss and retains the old version of your message. A frequently-used filter is the command .i fmt , designed to format outgoing mail. .pp To effect a temporary escape to .i Mail command mode instead, you can use the .(l ~:Mail command .)l escape. This is especially useful for retyping the message you are replying to, using, for example: .(l ~:t .)l It is also useful for setting options and modifying aliases. .pp If you wish abort the current message, you can use the escape .(l ~q .)l This will terminate the current message and return you to the shell (or Mail if you were using the mail command). If the save option is set, the message will be copied to the file .q dead.letter in your home directory. .pp If you wish (for some reason) to send a message that contains a line beginning with a tilde, you must double it. Thus, for example, .(l ~~This line begins with a tilde. .)l sends the line .(l ~This line begins with a tilde. .)l .pp Finally, the escape .(l ~? .)l prints out a brief summary of the available tilde escapes. .pp On some terminals (particularly ones with no lower case) tilde's are difficult to type. .i Mail allows you to change the escape character with the .q escape option. For example, I set .(l set escape=] .)l and use a right bracket instead of a tilde. If I ever need to send a line beginning with right bracket, I double it, just as for ~. Changing the escape character removes the special meaning of ~. .sh 2 "Network access" .pp This section describes how to send mail to people on other machines. Recall that sending to a plain login name sends mail to that person on your machine. If your machine is directly (or sometimes, even, indirectly) connected to the Arpanet, you can send messages to people on the Arpanet using a name of the form .(l name@host.domain .)l where .i name is the login name of the person you're trying to reach, .i host is the name of the machine on the Arpanet, and .i domain is the higher-level scope within which the hostname is known, e.g. EDU (for educational institutions), COM (for commercial entities), GOV (for governmental agencies), ARPA for many other things, BITNET or CSNET for those networks. .pp If your recipient logs in on a machine connected to yours by UUCP (the Bell Laboratories supplied network that communicates over telephone lines), sending mail can be a bit more complicated. You must know the list of machines through which your message must travel to arrive at his site. So, if his machine is directly connected to yours, you can send mail to him using the syntax: .(l host!name .)l where, again, .i host is the name of the machine and .i name is the login name. If your message must go through an intermediary machine first, you must use the syntax: .(l intermediary!host!name .)l and so on. It is actually a feature of UUCP that the map of all the systems in the network is not known anywhere (except where people decide to write it down for convenience). Talk to your system administrator about good ways to get places; the .i uuname command will tell you systems whose names are recognized, but not which ones are frequently called or well-connected. .pp When you use the .b reply command to respond to a letter, there is a problem of figuring out the names of the users in the .q "To:" and .q "Cc:" lists .i "relative to the current machine" . If the original letter was sent to you by someone on the local machine, then this problem does not exist, but if the message came from a remote machine, the problem must be dealt with. .i Mail uses a heuristic to build the correct name for each user relative to the local machine. So, when you .b reply to remote mail, the names in the .q "To:" and .q "Cc:" lists may change somewhat. .sh 2 "Special recipients" .pp As described previously, you can send mail to either user names or .b alias names. It is also possible to send messages directly to files or to programs, using special conventions. If a recipient name has a `/' in it or begins with a `+', it is assumed to be the path name of a file into which to send the message. If the file already exists, the message is appended to the end of the file. If you want to name a file in your current directory (ie, one for which a `/' would not usually be needed) you can precede the name with `./' So, to send mail to the file .q memo in the current directory, you can give the command: .(l % Mail ./memo .)l If the name begins with a `+,' it is expanded into the full path name of the folder name in your folder directory. This ability to send mail to files can be used for a variety of purposes, such as maintaining a journal and keeping a record of mail sent to a certain group of users. The second example can be done automatically by including the full pathname of the record file in the .b alias command for the group. Using our previous .b alias example, you might give the command: .(l alias project sam sally steve susan /usr/project/mail_record .)l Then, all mail sent to "project" would be saved on the file .q /usr/project/mail_record as well as being sent to the members of the project. This file can be examined using .i "Mail -f" . .pp It is sometimes useful to send mail directly to a program, for example one might write a project billboard program and want to access it using .i Mail . To send messages to the billboard program, one can send mail to the special name `|billboard' for example. .i Mail treats recipient names that begin with a `|' as a program to send the mail to. An .b alias can be set up to reference a `|' prefaced name if desired. .i Caveats : the shell treats `|' specially, so it must be quoted on the command line. Also, the `| program' must be presented as a single argument to mail. The safest course is to surround the entire name with double quotes. This also applies to usage in the .b alias command. For example, if we wanted to alias `rmsgs' to `rmsgs -s' we would need to say: .(l alias rmsgs "| rmsgs -s" .)l