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MAIL REFERENCE MANUAL

Kurt Shoens

Revised by

Craig Leres and Mark Andrews

Version 5.5

September 17, 1994

1. Introduction

Mail provides a simple and friendly environment for sending and receiving mail. It divides incoming

mail into its constituent messages and allows the user to deal with them in any order. In addition, it pro-

vides a set of ed-like commands for manipulating messages and sending mail. Mail offers the user simple

editing capabilities to ease the composition of outgoing messages, as well as providing the ability to define

and send to names which address groups of users. Finally, Mail is able to send and receive messages across

such networks as the ARPANET, UUCP, and Berkeley network.

This document describes how to use the Mail program to send and receive messages. The reader is

not assumed to be familiar with other message handling systems, but should be familiar with the

UNIX

1

shell, the text editor, and some of the common

UNIX

commands. “The

UNIX

Programmer’s Manual,” “An

Introduction to Csh,” and “Text Editing with Ex and Vi” can be consulted for more information on these

topics.

Here is how messages are handled: the mail system accepts incoming messages for you from other

people and collects them in a file, called your system mailbox. When you login, the system notifies you if

there are any messages waiting in your system mailbox. If you are a csh user, you will be notified when

new mail arrives if you inform the shell of the location of your mailbox. On version 7 systems, your system

mailbox is located in the directory /usr/spool/mail in a file with your login name. If your login name is

“sam,” then you can make csh notify you of new mail by including the following line in your .cshrc file:

set mail=/usr/spool/mail/sam

When you read your mail using Mail, it reads your system mailbox and separates that file into the individ-

ual messages that have been sent to you. You can then read, reply to, delete, or save these messages. Each

message is marked with its author and the date they sent it.

1

UNIX

is a trademark of Bell Laboratories.

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Mail Reference Manual

2. Common usage

The Mail command has two distinct usages, according to whether one wants to send or receive mail.

Sending mail is simple: to send a message to a user whose login name is, say, “root,” use the shell com-

mand:

% Mail root

then type your message. When you reach the end of the message, type an EOT (control−d) at the beginning

of a line, which will cause Mail to echo “EOT” and return you to the Shell. When the user you sent mail to

next logs in, he will receive the message:

You have mail.

to alert him to the existence of your message.

If, while you are composing the message you decide that you do not wish to send it after all, you can

abort the letter with a

RUBOUT

. Typing a single

RUBOUT

causes Mail to print

(Interrupt -- one more to kill letter)

Typing a second

RUBOUT

causes Mail to save your partial letter on the file “dead.letter” in your home direc-

tory and abort the letter. Once you have sent mail to someone, there is no way to undo the act, so be care-

ful.

The message your recipient reads will consist of the message you typed, preceded by a line telling

who sent the message (your login name) and the date and time it was sent.

If you want to send the same message to several other people, you can list their login names on the

command line. Thus,

% Mail sam bob john

Tuition fees are due next Friday. Don’t forget!!

<Control−d>

EOT

%

will send the reminder to sam, bob, and john.

If, when you log in, you see the message,

You have mail.

you can read the mail by typing simply:

% Mail

Mail will respond by typing its version number and date and then listing the messages you have waiting.

Then it will type a prompt and await your command. The messages are assigned numbers starting with 1

— you refer to the messages with these numbers. Mail keeps track of which messages are new (have been

sent since you last read your mail) and read (have been read by you). New messages have an N next to

them in the header listing and old, but unread messages have a U next to them. Mail keeps track of new/old

and read/unread messages by putting a header field called “Status” into your messages.

To look at a specific message, use the type command, which may be abbreviated to simply t. For

example, if you had the following messages:

N 1 root Wed Sep 21 09:21 "Tuition fees"

N 2 sam Tue Sep 20 22:55

you could examine the first message by giving the command:

type 1

which might cause Mail to respond with, for example:

Message 1:

From root Wed Sep 21 09:21:45 1978

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Subject: Tuition fees

Status: R

Tuition fees are due next Wednesday. Don’t forget!!

Many Mail commands that operate on messages take a message number as an argument like the type com-

mand. For these commands, there is a notion of a current message. When you enter the Mail program, the

current message is initially the first one. Thus, you can often omit the message number and use, for exam-

ple,

t

to type the current message. As a further shorthand, you can type a message by simply giving its message

number. Hence,

1

would type the first message.

Frequently, it is useful to read the messages in your mailbox in order, one after another. You can read

the next message in Mail by simply typing a newline. As a special case, you can type a newline as your

first command to Mail to type the first message.

If, after typing a message, you wish to immediately send a reply, you can do so with the reply com-

mand. Reply, like type, takes a message number as an argument. Mail then begins a message addressed to

the user who sent you the message. You may then type in your letter in reply, followed by a <control-d> at

the beginning of a line, as before. Mail will type EOT, then type the ampersand prompt to indicate its

readiness to accept another command. In our example, if, after typing the first message, you wished to

reply to it, you might give the command:

reply

Mail responds by typing:

To: root

Subject: Re: Tuition fees

and waiting for you to enter your letter. You are now in the message collection mode described at the

beginning of this section and Mail will gather up your message up to a control−d. Note that it copies the

subject header from the original message. This is useful in that correspondence about a particular matter

will tend to retain the same subject heading, making it easy to recognize. If there are other header fields in

the message, the information found will also be used. For example, if the letter had a “To:” header listing

several recipients, Mail would arrange to send your replay to the same people as well. Similarly, if the

original message contained a “Cc:” (carbon copies to) field, Mail would send your reply to those users, too.

Mail is careful, though, not too send the message to you, even if you appear in the “To:” or “Cc:” field,

unless you ask to be included explicitly. See section 4 for more details.

After typing in your letter, the dialog with Mail might look like the following:

reply

To: root

Subject: Tuition fees

Thanks for the reminder

EOT

&

The reply command is especially useful for sustaining extended conversations over the message sys-

tem, with other “listening” users receiving copies of the conversation. The reply command can be abbrevi-

ated to r.

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Sometimes you will receive a message that has been sent to several people and wish to reply only to

the person who sent it. Reply with a capital R replies to a message, but sends a copy to the sender only.

If you wish, while reading your mail, to send a message to someone, but not as a reply to one of your

messages, you can send the message directly with the mail command, which takes as arguments the names

of the recipients you wish to send to. For example, to send a message to “frank,” you would do:

mail frank

This is to confirm our meeting next Friday at 4.

EOT

&

The mail command can be abbreviated to m.

Normally, each message you receive is saved in the file mbox in your login directory at the time you

leave Mail. Often, however, you will not want to save a particular message you have received because it is

only of passing interest. To avoid saving a message in mbox you can delete it using the delete command.

In our example,

delete 1

will prevent Mail from saving message 1 (from root) in mbox. In addition to not saving deleted messages,

Mail will not let you type them, either. The effect is to make the message disappear altogether, along with

its number. The delete command can be abbreviated to simply d.

Many features of Mail can be tailored to your liking with the set command. The set command has

two forms, depending on whether you are setting a binary option or a valued option. Binary options are

either on or off. For example, the “ask” option informs Mail that each time you send a message, you want

it to prompt you for a subject header, to be included in the message. To set the “ask” option, you would

type

set ask

Another useful Mail option is “hold.” Unless told otherwise, Mail moves the messages from your

system mailbox to the file mbox in your home directory when you leave Mail. If you want Mail to keep

your letters in the system mailbox instead, you can set the “hold” option.

Valued options are values which Mail uses to adapt to your tastes. For example, the “SHELL” option

tells Mail which shell you like to use, and is specified by

set SHELL=/bin/csh

for example. Note that no spaces are allowed in “SHELL=/bin/csh.” A complete list of the Mail options

appears in section 5.

Another important valued option is “crt.” If you use a fast video terminal, you will find that when

you print long messages, they fly by too quickly for you to read them. With the “crt” option, you can make

Mail print any message larger than a given number of lines by sending it through a paging program. This

program is specified by the valued option PA GER. If PA GER is not set, a default paginator is used. For

example, most CRT users with 24-line screens should do:

set crt=24

to paginate messages that will not fit on their screens. In the default state, more (default paginator) prints a

screenful of information, then types --More--. Type a space to see the next screenful.

Another adaptation to user needs that Mail provides is that of aliases. An alias is simply a name

which stands for one or more real user names. Mail sent to an alias is really sent to the list of real users

associated with it. For example, an alias can be defined for the members of a project, so that you can send

mail to the whole project by sending mail to just a single name. The alias command in Mail defines an

alias. Suppose that the users in a project are named Sam, Sally, Steve, and Susan. To define an alias called

“project” for them, you would use the Mail command:

alias project sam sally steve susan

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The alias command can also be used to provide a convenient name for someone whose user name is incon-

venient. For example, if a user named “Bob Anderson” had the login name “anderson,"” you might want to

use:

alias bob anderson

so that you could send mail to the shorter name, “bob.”

While the alias and set commands allow you to customize Mail, they have the drawback that they

must be retyped each time you enter Mail. To make them more convenient to use, Mail always looks for

two files when it is invoked. It first reads a system wide file “/usr/lib/Mail.rc,” then a user specific file,

“.mailrc,” which is found in the user’s home directory. The system wide file is maintained by the system

administrator and contains set commands that are applicable to all users of the system. The “.mailrc” file is

usually used by each user to set options the way he likes and define individual aliases. For example, my

.mailrc file looks like this:

set ask nosave SHELL=/bin/csh

As you can see, it is possible to set many options in the same set command. The “nosave” option is

described in section 5.

Mail aliasing is implemented at the system-wide level by the mail delivery system sendmail. These

aliases are stored in the file /usr/lib/aliases and are accessible to all users of the system. The lines in

/usr/lib/aliases are of the form:

alias: name

1

, name

2

, name

3

where alias is the mailing list name and the name

i

are the members of the list. Long lists can be continued

onto the next line by starting the next line with a space or tab. Remember that you must execute the shell

command newaliases after editing /usr/lib/aliases since the delivery system uses an indexed file created by

newaliases.

We have seen that Mail can be invoked with command line arguments which are people to send the

message to, or with no arguments to read mail. Specifying the −f flag on the command line causes Mail to

read messages from a file other than your system mailbox. For example, if you have a collection of mes-

sages in the file “letters” you can use Mail to read them with:

% Mail −f letters

You can use all the Mail commands described in this document to examine, modify, or delete messages

from your “letters” file, which will be rewritten when you leave Mail with the quit command described

below.

Since mail that you read is saved in the file mbox in your home directory by default, you can read

mbox in your home directory by using simply

% Mail −f

Normally, messages that you examine using the type command are saved in the file “mbox” in your

home directory if you leave Mail with the quit command described below. If you wish to retain a message

in your system mailbox you can use the preserve command to tell Mail to leave it there. The preserve

command accepts a list of message numbers, just like type and may be abbreviated to pre.

Messages in your system mailbox that you do not examine are normally retained in your system

mailbox automatically. If you wish to have such a message saved in mbox without reading it, you may use

the mbox command to have them so saved. For example,

mbox 2

in our example would cause the second message (from sam) to be saved in mbox when the quit command is

executed. Mbox is also the way to direct messages to your mbox file if you have set the “hold” option

described above. Mbox can be abbreviated to mb.

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When you have perused all the messages of interest, you can leave Mail with the quit command,

which saves the messages you have typed but not deleted in the file mbox in your login directory. Deleted

messages are discarded irretrievably, and messages left untouched are preserved in your system mailbox so

that you will see them the next time you type:

% Mail

The quit command can be abbreviated to simply q.

If you wish for some reason to leave Mail quickly without altering either your system mailbox or

mbox, you can type the x command (short for exit), which will immediately return you to the Shell without

changing anything.

If, instead, you want to execute a Shell command without leaving Mail, you can type the command

preceded by an exclamation point, just as in the text editor. Thus, for instance:

!date

will print the current date without leaving Mail.

Finally, the help command is available to print out a brief summary of the Mail commands, using

only the single character command abbreviations.

3. Maintaining folders

Mail includes a simple facility for maintaining groups of messages together in folders. This section

describes this facility.

To use the folder facility, you must tell Mail where you wish to keep your folders. Each folder of

messages will be a single file. For convenience, all of your folders are kept in a single directory of your

choosing. To tell Mail where your folder directory is, put a line of the form

set folder=letters

in your .mailrc file. If, as in the example above, your folder directory does not begin with a ‘/,’ Mail will

assume that your folder directory is to be found starting from your home directory. Thus, if your home

directory is /usr/person the above example told Mail to find your folder directory in /usr/person/letters.

Anywhere a file name is expected, you can use a folder name, preceded with ‘+.’ For example, to put

a message into a folder with the save command, you can use:

save +classwork

to save the current message in the classwork folder. If the classwork folder does not yet exist, it will be cre-

ated. Note that messages which are saved with the save command are automatically removed from your

system mailbox.

In order to make a copy of a message in a folder without causing that message to be removed from

your system mailbox, use the copy command, which is identical in all other respects to the save command.

For example,

copy +classwork

copies the current message into the classwork folder and leaves a copy in your system mailbox.

The folder command can be used to direct Mail to the contents of a different folder. For example,

folder +classwork

directs Mail to read the contents of the classwork folder. All of the commands that you can use on your

system mailbox are also applicable to folders, including type, delete, and reply. To inquire which folder

you are currently editing, use simply:

folder

To list your current set of folders, use the folders command.

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To start Mail reading one of your folders, you can use the −f option described in section 2. For

example:

% Mail −f +classwork

will cause Mail to read your classwork folder without looking at your system mailbox.

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4. More about sending mail

4.1. Tilde escapes

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. Mail

provides these capabilities through tilde escapes, which consist of a tilde (˜) at the beginning of a line, fol-

lowed by a single character which indicates the function to be performed. For example, to print the text of

the message so far, use:

˜p

which will print a line of dashes, the recipients of your message, and the text of the message so far. Since

Mail requires two consecutive

RUBOUT

’s to abort a letter, you can use a single

RUBOUT

to abort the output

of ˜p or any other ˜ escape without killing your letter.

If you are dissatisfied with the message as it stands, you can invoke the text editor on it using the

escape

˜e

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. Mail will respond by typ-

ing

(continue)

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 Mail. You can override this default by setting the

valued option “EDITOR” to something else. For example, you might prefer:

set EDITOR=/usr/ucb/ex

Many systems offer a screen editor as an alternative to the standard text editor, such as the vi editor

from UC Berkeley. To use the screen, or visual editor, on your current message, you can use the escape,

˜v

˜v works like ˜e, except that the screen editor is invoked instead. A default screen editor is defined by Mail.

If it does not suit you, you can set the valued option “VISUAL” to the path name of a different editor.

It is often useful to be able to include the contents of some file in your message; the escape

˜r filename

is provided for this purpose, and causes the named file to be appended to your current message. Mail com-

plains 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 con-

tain shell metacharacters like * and ? which are expanded according to the conventions of your shell.

As a special case of ˜r, the escape

˜d

reads in the file “dead.letter” in your home directory. This is often useful since Mail copies the text of your

message there when you abort a message with

RUBOUT

.

To save the current text of your message on a file you may use the

˜w filename

escape. Mail will print out the number of lines and characters written to the file, after which you may con-

tinue 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.

If you are sending mail from within Mail’s command mode you can read a message sent to you into

the message you are constructing with the escape:

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˜m 4

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.

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

˜t name1 name2 ...

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.

If you wish, you can associate a subject with your message by using the escape

˜s Arbitrary string of text

which replaces any previous subject with “Arbitrary string of text.” The subject, if given, is sent near the

top of the message prefixed with “Subject:” You can see what the message will look like by using ˜p.

For political reasons, one occasionally prefers to list certain people as recipients of carbon copies of a

message rather than direct recipients. The escape

˜c name1 name2 ...

adds the named people to the “Cc:” list, similar to ˜t. Again, you can execute ˜p to see what the message

will look like.

The escape

˜b name1 name2 ...

adds the named people to the “Cc:” list, but does not make the names visible in the “Cc:” line ("blind" car-

bon copy).

The recipients of the message together constitute the “To:” field, the subject the “Subject:” field, and

the carbon copies the “Cc:” field. If you wish to edit these in ways impossible with the ˜t, ˜s, ˜c and ˜b

escapes, you can use the escape

˜h

which prints “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,

˜h

To: root kurt####bill

would change the initial recipients “root kurt” to “root bill.” When you type a newline, Mail advances to

the “Subject:” field, where the same rules apply. Another newline brings you to the “Cc:” field, which may

be edited in the same fashion. Another newline brings you to the “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.

To effect a temporary escape to the shell, the escape

˜!command

is used, which executes command and returns you to mailing mode without altering the text of your mes-

sage. If you wish, instead, to filter the body of your message through a shell command, then you can use

˜|command

which pipes your message through the command and uses the output as the new text of your message. If

the command produces no output, Mail assumes that something is amiss and retains the old version of your

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message. A frequently-used filter is the command fmt, designed to format outgoing mail.

To effect a temporary escape to Mail command mode instead, you can use the

˜:Mail command

escape. This is especially useful for retyping the message you are replying to, using, for example:

˜:t

It is also useful for setting options and modifying aliases.

If you wish abort the current message, you can use the escape

˜q

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 “dead.letter” in your home direc-

tory.

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,

˜˜This line begins with a tilde.

sends the line

˜This line begins with a tilde.

Finally, the escape

˜?

prints out a brief summary of the available tilde escapes.

On some terminals (particularly ones with no lower case) tilde’s are difficult to type. Mail allows you

to change the escape character with the “escape” option. For example, I set

set escape=]

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 ˜.

4.2. Network access

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

name@host.domain

where name is the login name of the person you’re trying to reach, host is the name of the machine on the

Arpanet, and domain is the higher-level scope within which the hostname is known, e.g. EDU (for educa-

tional institutions), COM (for commercial entities), GOV (for governmental agencies), ARPA for many

other things, BITNET or CSNET for those networks.

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:

host!name

where, again, host is the name of the machine and name is the login name. If your message must go

through an intermediary machine first, you must use the syntax:

intermediary!host!name

and so on. It is actually a feature of UUCP that the map of all the systems in the network is not known

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anywhere (except where people decide to write it down for convenience). Talk to your system administra-

tor about good ways to get places; the uuname command will tell you systems whose names are recog-

nized, but not which ones are frequently called or well-connected.

When you use the reply command to respond to a letter, there is a problem of figuring out the names

of the users in the “To:” and “Cc:” lists 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. Mail uses a heuristic to build the correct name for each user rela-

tive to the local machine. So, when you reply to remote mail, the names in the “To:” and “Cc:” lists may

change somewhat.

4.3. Special recipients

As described previously, you can send mail to either user names or 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 “memo” in the current directory, you can give the command:

% Mail ./memo

If the name begins with a ‘+,’ it is expanded into the full path name of the folder name in your folder direc-

tory. 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 automati-

cally by including the full pathname of the record file in the alias command for the group. Using our previ-

ous alias example, you might give the command:

alias project sam sally steve susan /usr/project/mail_record

Then, all mail sent to "project" would be saved on the file “/usr/project/mail_record” as well as being sent

to the members of the project. This file can be examined using Mail −f.

It is sometimes useful to send mail directly to a program, for example one might write a project bill-

board program and want to access it using Mail. To send messages to the billboard program, one can send

mail to the special name ‘|billboard’ for example. Mail treats recipient names that begin with a ‘|’ as a pro-

gram to send the mail to. An alias can be set up to reference a ‘|’ prefaced name if desired. 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 alias command. For example, if we wanted to alias ‘rmsgs’ to ‘rmsgs −s’ we

would need to say:

alias rmsgs "| rmsgs -s"

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5. Additional features

This section describes some additional commands useful for reading your mail, setting options, and

handling lists of messages.

5.1. Message lists

Several Mail commands accept a list of messages as an argument. Along with type and delete,

described in section 2, there is the from command, which prints the message headers associated with the

message list passed to it. The from command is particularly useful in conjunction with some of the mes-

sage list features described below.

A message list consists of a list of message numbers, ranges, and names, separated by spaces or tabs.

Message numbers may be either decimal numbers, which directly specify messages, or one of the special

characters “↑” “.” or “$” to specify the first relevant, current, or last relevant message, respectively. Rele-

vant here means, for most commands “not deleted” and “deleted” for the undelete command.

A range of messages consists of two message numbers (of the form described in the previous para-

graph) separated by a dash. Thus, to print the first four messages, use

type 1−4

and to print all the messages from the current message to the last message, use

type .−$

A name is a user name. The user names given in the message list are collected together and each

message selected by other means is checked to make sure it was sent by one of the named users. If the

message consists entirely of user names, then every message sent by one of those users that is relevant (in

the sense described earlier) is selected. Thus, to print every message sent to you by “root,” do

type root

As a shorthand notation, you can specify simply “*” to get every relevant (same sense) message.

Thus,

type *

prints all undeleted messages,

delete *

deletes all undeleted messages, and

undelete *

undeletes all deleted messages.

You can search for the presence of a word in subject lines with /. For example, to print the headers of

all messages that contain the word “PASCAL,” do:

from /pascal

Note that subject searching ignores upper/lower case differences.

5.2. List of commands

This section describes all the Mail commands available when receiving mail.

−

The − command goes to the previous message and prints it. The − command may be given a decimal

number n as an argument, in which case the nth previous message is gone to and printed.

?

Prints a brief summary of commands.

!

Used to preface a command to be executed by the shell.

Print

Like print, but also print out ignored header fields. See also print, ignore and retain. Print can be

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abbreviated to P.

Reply or Respond

Note the capital R in the name. Frame a reply to a one or more messages. The reply (or replies if

you are using this on multiple messages) will be sent ONLY to the person who sent you the message

(respectively, the set of people who sent the messages you are replying to). You can add people using

the ˜t, ˜c and ˜b tilde escapes. The subject in your reply is formed by prefacing the subject in the

original message with “Re:” unless it already began thus. If the original message included a “reply-

to” header field, the reply will go only to the recipient named by “reply-to.” You type in your mes-

sage using the same conventions available to you through the mail command. The Reply command

is especially useful for replying to messages that were sent to enormous distribution groups when you

really just want to send a message to the originator. Use it often. Reply (and Respond) can be

abbreviated to R.

Type

Identical to the Print command. Type can be abbreviated to T.

alias Define a name to stand for a set of other names. This is used when you want to send messages to a

certain group of people and want to avoid retyping their names. For example

alias project john sue willie kathryn

creates an alias project which expands to the four people John, Sue, Willie, and Kathryn. If no argu-

ments are given, all currently-defined aliases are printed. If one argument is given, that alias is

printed (if it exists). Alias can be abbreviated to a.

alternates

If you have accounts on several machines, you may find it convenient to use the /usr/lib/aliases on all

the machines except one to direct your mail to a single account. The alternates command is used to

inform Mail that each of these other addresses is really you. Alternates takes a list of user names and

remembers that they are all actually you. When you reply to messages that were sent to one of these

alternate names, Mail will not bother to send a copy of the message to this other address (which

would simply be directed back to you by the alias mechanism). If alternates is given no argument, it

lists the current set of alternate names. Alternates is usually used in the .mailrc file. Alternates can

be abbreviated to alt.

chdir

The chdir command allows you to change your current directory. Chdir takes a single argument,

which is taken to be the pathname of the directory to change to. If no argument is given, chdir

changes to your home directory. Chdir can be abbreviated to c.

copy

The copy command does the same thing that save does, except that it does not mark the messages it

is used on for deletion when you quit. Copy can be abbreviated to co.

delete

Deletes a list of messages. Deleted messages can be reclaimed with the undelete command. Delete

can be abbreviated to d.

dp or dt

These commands delete the current message and print the next message. They are useful for quickly

reading and disposing of mail. If there is no next message, mail says ‘‘at EOF.’’

edit To edit individual messages using the text editor, the edit command is provided. The edit command

takes a list of messages as described under the type command and processes each by writing it into

the file Messagex where x is the message number being edited and executing the text editor on it.

When you have edited the message to your satisfaction, write the message out and quit, upon which

Mail will read the message back and remove the file. Edit can be abbreviated to e.

else Marks the end of the then-part of an if statement and the beginning of the part to take effect if the

condition of the if statement is false.

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endif

Marks the end of an if statement.

exit or xit

Leave Mail without updating the system mailbox or the file your were reading. Thus, if you acciden-

tally delete several messages, you can use exit to avoid scrambling your mailbox. Exit can be abbre-

viated to ex or x.

file The same as folder. File can be abbreviated to fi.

folders

List the names of the folders in your folder directory.

folder

The folder command switches to a new mail file or folder. With no arguments, it tells you which file

you are currently reading. If you give it an argument, it will write out changes (such as deletions)

you have made in the current file and read the new file. Some special conventions are recognized for

the name:

Name

Meaning

#

Previous file read

%

Your system mailbox

%name

Name’s system mailbox

&

Your ˜/mbox file

+folder

A file in your folder directory

Folder can be abbreviated to fo.

from

The from command takes a list of messages and prints out the header lines for each one; hence

from joe

is the easy way to display all the message headers from “joe.” From can be abbreviated to f.

headers

When you start up Mail to read your mail, it lists the message headers that you have. These headers

tell you who each message is from, when they were received, how many lines and characters each

message is, and the “Subject:” header field of each message, if present. In addition, Mail tags the

message header of each message that has been the object of the preserve command with a “P.” Mes-

sages that have been saved or written are flagged with a “*.” Finally, deleted messages are not

printed at all. If you wish to reprint the current list of message headers, you can do so with the head-

ers command. The headers command (and thus the initial header listing) only lists the first so many

message headers. The number of headers listed depends on the speed of your terminal. This can be

overridden by specifying the number of headers you want with the window option. Mail maintains a

notion of the current “window” into your messages for the purposes of printing headers. Use the z

command to move forward and back a window. You can move Mail’s notion of the current window

directly to a particular message by using, for example,

headers 40

to move Mail’s attention to the messages around message 40. If a ‘‘+’’ argument is given, then the

next screenful of message headers is printed, and if a ‘‘−’’ argument is given, the previous screenful

of message headers is printed. Headers can be abbreviated to h.

help Print a brief and usually out of date help message about the commands in Mail. The man page for

mail is usually more up-to-date than either the help message or this manual. It is also a synonym for

?.

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hold Arrange to hold a list of messages in the system mailbox, instead of moving them to the file mbox in

your home directory. If you set the binary option hold, this will happen by default. It does not over-

ride the delete command. Hold can be abbreviated to ho.

if

Commands in your “.mailrc” file can be executed conditionally depending on whether you are send-

ing or receiving mail with the if command. For example, you can do:

if receive

commands...

endif

An else form is also available:

if send

commands...

else

commands...

endif

Note that the only allowed conditions are receive and send.

ignore

N.B.: Ignore has been superseded by retain.

Add the list of header fields named to the ignore list. Header fields in the ignore list are not printed

on your terminal when you print a message. This allows you to suppress printing of certain machine-

generated header fields, such as Via which are not usually of interest. The Type and Print com-

mands can be used to print a message in its entirety, including ignored fields. If ignore is executed

with no arguments, it lists the current set of ignored fields.

list List the valid Mail commands. List can be abbreviated to l.

mail Send mail to one or more people. If you have the ask option set, Mail will prompt you for a subject

to your message. Then you can type in your message, using tilde escapes as described in section 4 to

edit, print, or modify your message. To signal your satisfaction with the message and send it, type

control-d at the beginning of a line, or a . alone on a line if you set the option dot. To abort the mes-

sage, type two interrupt characters (

RUBOUT

by default) in a row or use the ˜q escape. The mail com-

mand can be abbreviated to m.

mbox

Indicate that a list of messages be sent to mbox in your home directory when you quit. This is the

default action for messages if you do not have the hold option set.

next or +

The next command goes to the next message and types it. If given a message list, next goes to the

first such message and types it. Thus,

next root

goes to the next message sent by “root” and types it. The next command can be abbreviated to sim-

ply a newline, which means that one can go to and type a message by simply giving its message num-

ber or one of the magic characters “ˆ” “.” or “$”. Thus,

.

prints the current message and

4

prints message 4, as described previously. Next can be abbreviated to n.

preserve

Same as hold. Cause a list of messages to be held in your system mailbox when you quit. Preserve

can be abbreviated to pre.

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print

Print the specified messages. If the crt variable is set, messages longer than the number of lines it

indicates are paged through the command specified by the PA GER variable. The print command

can be abbreviated to p.

quit Terminates the session, saving all undeleted, unsaved and unwritten messages in the user’s mbox file

in their login directory (messages marked as having been read), preserving all messages marked with

hold or preserve or never referenced in their system mailbox. Any messages that were deleted,

saved, written or saved to mbox are removed from their system mailbox. If new mail has arrived dur-

ing the session, the message ‘‘You have new mail’’ is given. If given while editing a mailbox file

with the −f flag, then the edit file is rewritten. A return to the Shell is effected, unless the rewrite of

edit file fails, in which case the user can escape with the exit command. Quit can be abbreviated to

q.

reply or respond

Frame a reply to a single message. The reply will be sent to the person who sent you the message (to

which you are replying), plus all the people who received the original message, except you. You can

add people using the ˜t, ˜c and ˜b tilde escapes. The subject in your reply is formed by prefacing the

subject in the original message with “Re:” unless it already began thus. If the original message

included a “reply-to” header field, the reply will go only to the recipient named by “reply-to.” You

type in your message using the same conventions available to you through the mail command. The

reply (and respond) command can be abbreviated to r.

retain

Add the list of header fields named to the retained list. Only the header fields in the retain list are

shown on your terminal when you print a message. All other header fields are suppressed. The Type

and Print commands can be used to print a message in its entirety. If retain is executed with no

arguments, it lists the current set of retained fields.

save It is often useful to be able to save messages on related topics in a file. The save command gives you

the ability to do this. The save command takes as an argument a list of message numbers, followed

by the name of the file in which to save the messages. The messages are appended to the named file,

thus allowing one to keep several messages in the file, stored in the order they were put there. The

filename in quotes, followed by the line count and character count is echoed on the user’s terminal.

An example of the save command relative to our running example is:

s 1 2 tuitionmail

Saved messages are not automatically saved in mbox at quit time, nor are they selected by the next

command described above, unless explicitly specified. Save can be abbreviated to s.

set

Set an option or give an option a value. Used to customize Mail. Section 5.3 contains a list of the

options. Options can be binary, in which case they are on or off, or valued. To set a binary option

option on, do

set option

To give the valued option option the value value, do

set option=value

There must be no space before or after the ‘‘=’’ sign. If no arguments are given, all variable values

are printed. Several options can be specified in a single set command. Set can be abbreviated to se.

shell The shell command allows you to escape to the shell. Shell invokes an interactive shell and allows

you to type commands to it. When you leave the shell, you will return to Mail. The shell used is a

default assumed by Mail; you can override this default by setting the valued option “SHELL,” eg:

set SHELL=/bin/csh

Shell can be abbreviated to sh.

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size Takes a message list and prints out the size in characters of each message.

source

The source command reads mail commands from a file. It is useful when you are trying to fix your

“.mailrc” file and you need to re-read it. Source can be abbreviated to so.

top The top command takes a message list and prints the first five lines of each addressed message. If

you wish, you can change the number of lines that top prints out by setting the valued option

“toplines.” On a CRT terminal,

set toplines=10

might be preferred. Top can be abbreviated to to.

type Same as print. Takes a message list and types out each message on the terminal. The type com-

mand can be abbreviated to t.

undelete

Takes a message list and marks each message as not being deleted. Undelete can be abbreviated to

u.

unread

Takes a message list and marks each message as not having been read. Unread can be abbreviated to

U.

unset

Takes a list of option names and discards their remembered values; the inverse of set .

visual

It is often useful to be able to invoke one of two editors, based on the type of terminal one is using.

To invoke a display oriented editor, you can use the visual command. The operation of the visual

command is otherwise identical to that of the edit command.

Both the edit and visual commands assume some default text editors. These default editors can be

overridden by the valued options “EDITOR” and “VISUAL” for the standard and screen editors.

You might want to do:

set EDITOR=/usr/ucb/ex VISUAL=/usr/ucb/vi

Visual can be abbreviated to v.

write

The save command always writes the entire message, including the headers, into the file. If you want

to write just the message itself, you can use the write command. The write command has the same

syntax as the save command, and can be abbreviated to simply w. Thus, we could write the second

message by doing:

w 2 file.c

As suggested by this example, the write command is useful for such tasks as sending and receiving

source program text over the message system. The filename in quotes, followed by the line count and

character count is echoed on the user’s terminal.

z

Mail presents message headers in windowfuls as described under the headers command. You can

move Mail’s attention forward to the next window by giving the

z+

command. Analogously, you can move to the previous window with:

z−

5.3. Custom options

Throughout this manual, we have seen examples of binary and valued options. This section describes

each of the options in alphabetical order, including some that you have not seen yet. To avoid confusion,

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please note that the options are either all lower case letters or all upper case letters. When I start a sentence

such as: “Ask” causes Mail to prompt you for a subject header, I am only capitalizing “ask” as a courtesy to

English.

EDITOR

The valued option “EDITOR” defines the pathname of the text editor to be used in the edit command

and ˜e. If not defined, a standard editor is used.

PA GER

Pathname of the program to use for paginating output when it exceeds crt lines. A default paginator

is used if this option is not defined.

SHELL

The valued option “SHELL” gives the path name of your shell. This shell is used for the ! command

and ˜! escape. In addition, this shell expands file names with shell metacharacters like * and ? in

them.

VISUAL

The valued option “VISUAL” defines the pathname of the screen editor to be used in the visual com-

mand and ˜v escape. A standard screen editor is used if you do not define one.

append

The “append” option is binary and causes messages saved in mbox to be appended to the end rather

than prepended. Normally, Mail will put messages in mbox in the same order that the system puts

messages in your system mailbox. By setting “append,” you are requesting that mbox be appended to

regardless. It is in any event quicker to append.

ask “Ask” is a binary option which causes Mail to prompt you for the subject of each message you send.

If you respond with simply a newline, no subject field will be sent.

askcc

“Askcc” is a binary option which causes you to be prompted for additional carbon copy recipients at

the end of each message. Responding with a newline shows your satisfaction with the current list.

autoprint

“Autoprint” is a binary option which causes the delete command to behave like dp — thus, after

deleting a message, the next one will be typed automatically. This is useful when quickly scanning

and deleting messages in your mailbox.

crt The valued option is used as a threshold to determine how long a message must be before PA GER is

used to read it.

debug

The binary option “debug” causes debugging information to be displayed. Use of this option is the

same as using the −d command line flag.

dot “Dot” is a binary option which, if set, causes Mail to interpret a period alone on a line as the termina-

tor of the message you are sending.

escape

To allow you to change the escape character used when sending mail, you can set the valued option

“escape.” Only the first character of the “escape” option is used, and it must be doubled if it is to

appear as the first character of a line of your message. If you change your escape character, then ˜

loses all its special meaning, and need no longer be doubled at the beginning of a line.

folder

The name of the directory to use for storing folders of messages. If this name begins with a ‘/’ Mail

considers it to be an absolute pathname; otherwise, the folder directory is found relative to your home

directory.

hold The binary option “hold” causes messages that have been read but not manually dealt with to be held

in the system mailbox. This prevents such messages from being automatically swept into your mbox

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