e-mail

[Ben Beeson]

Ron,

	Yes, there is a way to do that.  BTW, questions and answers are what 
this group is all about ;-)  It isn't at all like the GUI you may be used 
to, but you can do your mail (less the graphic inserts, bells and 
whistles etc) from the command line with /bin/mail.  You can find out 
about how to use this by opening a command shell and typing "man mail" 
without the quotes.  The mail reference manual is also available on line at: 

 http://132.239.50.3/offerings/userhelp/HTML/mail.refman,d.html 

I seldom use the command line apps for my personal mail, although I find 
them extremely handy in shell scripts.  Knowledge of how to read and send 
mail from a command line is useful for other tasks though.  I had 
occasion to get a list of names from a file on a Sun Server at work 
recently.  I needed to get this list to my desktop pc so I could answer 
an e-mail and include the list. The server didn't have a floppy drive, or 
a GUI mail app.  Solution:  "cat filename | /bin/mailx -s "file of names" 
ben at work."  That took all of a few seconds to run and I got exactly what 
I needed out of it.  Meanwhile, our M$ MCSE was calling all over trying 
to figure out how to do this... I quietly left her to her devices and 
went about my business...   

	I don't know if your version of Linux has other mail applications 
installed, but you may wish to investigate the kmail, xmail, Elm, Mutt, 
Netscape, and StarOffice mail applications.  (You already mentioned 
pine.) Mail is also available in the emacs editor if you prefer that once 
you set it up. You can find info on the emacs mail interface at: 

http://www.cis.ksu.edu/Systems/Info/gnu/vm.Top.html 

(I know this is not an exhaustive list of mail apps, and I have probably 
left out some good ones, so check around and see what everyone else 
suggests, try a few and pick one or 20.) 

	At the risk of generating some discussion on the list, I'll also suggest 
that you can use "fetchmail" to get your mail from a pop-server. Find out 
about fetchmail at:

 http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail/ 

This will end up storing your mail on your hardrive in 
/var/spool/mail/$USERNAME directory (unless you specify it to go 
somewhere else.)  From here, you can use /bin/mail to read it without 
having to fool with the pop-server from the command line because 
fetchmail did that for you already.  For that matter, you can use just 
about all the mail apps I listed above to read mail stored in your system 
tree except for StarOffice.  I haven't figured out why the authors of 
StarOffice did not include that capability, all I know is that it isn't 
there.  

Hope this helps,
Good Luck,

Ben   








>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 11/6/01, 10:00:25 PM, Ron Honda <ron308linux at hawaii.rr.com> wrote 
regarding [luau] e-mail:


> Sorry to bother the thread, but could anyone tell me if there's a way to
> send and retrieve e-mail from the command line. I have been able to send
> using pine, but don't know how to configure the pop-server part. Is there
> another program that I should be using? Is it safe to use these mail
> programs? I have been messing with Linux for about two years, but mostly 
in
> the graphical modes. I am not able to grasp most of conversations take 
place
> on this thread because I don't understand all the technical stuff. If 
anyone
> can help, thanks.



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