CHAPTER 2: E-MAIL

2.1 THE BASICS

Electronic mail, or e-mail, is your personal connection to the world of
the Net.

All of the millions of people around the world who use the Net have their
own e-mail addresses. A growing number of "gateways" tie more and more
people to the Net every day.

The basic concepts behind e-mail parallel those of regular mail. You
send mail to people at their particular addresses. In turn, they write
to you at your e-mail address. You can subscribe to the electronic
equivalent of magazines and newspapers. Sooner or later, you'll probably
even get electronic junk mail.

E-mail has two distinct advantages over regular mail. The most obvious
is speed. Instead of several days, your message can reach the other side
of the world in hours, minutes or even seconds (depending on where you
drop off your mail and the state of the connections between there and
your recipient). The other advantage is that once you master the basics,
you'll be able to use e-mail to access databases and file libraries.
You'll see how to do this later, in chapter 10, along with learning how
to transfer program and data files through e-mail.

E-mail also has advantages over the telephone. You send your message
when it's convenient for you. Your recipients respond at their
convenience. No more telephone tag. And while a phone call across the
country or around the world can quickly result in huge phone bills, e-
mail lets you exchange vast amounts of mail for only a few pennies --
even if the other person is on the other side of the earth.

E-mail is your connection to help -- your Net lifeline. The Net can
sometimes seem a frustrating place! No matter how hard you try, no
matter where you look, you just might not be able to find the answer to
whatever is causing you problems. But when you know how to use e-mail,
help is often just a few keystrokes away: you can ask your system
administrator or a friend for help in an e-mail message.

The quickest way to start learning e-mail is to send yourself a message.
Most public-access sites actually have several different types of mail
systems, all of which let you both send and receive mail. We'll start
with the simplest one, known, appropriately enough, as "mail," and then
look at a couple of other interfaces. At your host system's command
prompt, type:

mail username

where username is the name you gave yourself when you first logged on.
Hit enter. The computer might respond with

subject:

Type

test

or, actually, anything at all (but you'll have to hit enter before you
get to the end of the screen). Hit enter.

The cursor will drop down a line. You can now begin writing the actual
message. Type a sentence, again, anything at all. And here's where you
hit your first Unix frustration, one that will bug you repeatedly: you
have to hit enter before you get to the very end of the line. Just like
typewriters, many Unix programs have no word-wrapping (although there are
ways to get some Unix text processors, such as emacs, to word-wrap).

When done with your message, hit return. Now hit control-D (hold down the
control key, then hit your d key). This is a Unix command that tells the
computer you're done writing and that it should close your "envelope" and
mail it off (you could also hit enter once and then, on a blank line,
type a period at the beginning of the line and hit enter again).

You've just sent your first e-mail message. And because you're sending
mail to yourself, rather than to someone somewhere else on the Net, your
message has already arrived, as we'll see in a moment.

If you had wanted, you could have even written your message on your own
computer and then uploaded it into this electronic "envelope." There are
a couple of good reasons to do this with long or involved messages. One
is that once you hit enter at the end of a line in "mail" you can't
readily fix any mistakes on that line (unless you use some special
commands to call up a Unix text processor). Also, if you are paying for
access by the hour, uploading a prepared message can save you money.
Remember to save the document in ASCII or text format. Uploading a
document you've created in a word processor that uses special formatting
commands (which these days means many programs) will cause strange
effects.

When you get that blank line after the subject line, upload the message
using the ASCII protocol. Or you can copy and paste the text, if your
software allows that. When done, hit control-D as above.

Now you have mail waiting for you. Normally, when you log on, your
public-access site will tell you whether you have new mail waiting. To
open your mailbox and see your waiting mail, type

mail

and hit enter.

When the host system sees "mail" without a name after it, it knows you
want to look in your mailbox rather than send a message. On a plain-
Unix system, your screen will display something like:

Mail version SMI 4.0 Mon Apr 24 18:34:15 PDT 1989 Type ? for help.
"/usr/spool/mail/adamg": 1 message 1 new 1 unread

>N 1 adamg Sat Jan 15 20:04 12/290 test

Ignore the first line; it's just computerese of value only to the
people who run your system. You can type a question mark and hit return
to bring up a list of help files, but unless you're familiar with Unix,
most of what you'll see won't make much sense.

The second line tells you the directory on the host system where your
mail messages are put, which again, is not something you'll likely need
to know. The second line also tells you how many messages are in your
mailbox, how many have come in since the last time you looked and how
many messages you haven't read yet.

It's the third line that is of real interest -- it tells you who the
message is from, when it arrived, how many lines and characters it takes
up, and what the subject is. The "N" means it is a new message -- it
arrived after the last time you looked in your mailbox. Hit enter. And
there's your message -- only now it's a lot longer than what you wrote!

Message 1:
From adamg Jan 15 20:04:55 1994
Received: by eff.org id AA28949
(5.65c/IDA-1.4.4/pen-ident for adamg); Sat, 15 Jan 1994 20:04:55 -0400
(ident-sender: adamg@eff.org)
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 1994 21:34:55 -0400
From: Adam Gaffin <adamg>
Message-Id: <199204270134.AA28949@eff.org>
To: adamg
Subject: test
Status: R

This is only a test!

Whoa! What is all that stuff? It's your message with a postmark gone mad.
Just as the postal service puts its marks on every piece of mail it
handles, so do Net postal systems. Only it's called a "header" instead
of a postmark. Each system that handles or routes your mail puts its
stamp on it. Since many messages go through a number of systems on their
way to you, you will often get messages with headers that seem to go on
forever. Among other things, a header will tell you exactly when a
message was sent and received (even the difference between your local
time and Greenwich Mean Time -- as at the end of line 4 above).

If this had been a long message, it would just keep scrolling across and
down your screen -- unless the people who run your public-access site
have set it up to pause every 24 lines. One way to deal with a message
that doesn't stop is to use your telecommunication software's logging or
text-buffer function. Start it before you hit the number of the message
you want to see. Your computer will ask you what you want to call the
file you're about to create. After you name the file and hit enter, type
the number of the message you want to see and hit enter. When the
message finishes scrolling, turn off the text-buffer function. The
message is now saved in your computer. This way, you can read the
message while not connected to the Net (whichq can save you money if
you're paying by the hour) and write a reply offline.

But in the meantime, now what? You can respond to the message, delete it
or save it. To respond, type a lowercase r and hit enter. You'll get
something like this:

To: adamg
Subject: Re: test

Note that this time, you don't have to enter a user name. The computer
takes it from the message you're replying to and automatically addresses
your message to its sender. The computer also automatically inserts a
subject line, by adding "Re:" to the original subject. From here, it's
just like writing a new message. But say you change your mind and decide
not to reply after all. How do you get out of the message? Hit control-C
once. You'll get this:

(Interrupt -- one more to kill letter)

If you hit control-C once more, the message will disappear and you'll get
back to your mail's command line.

Now, if you type a lowercase d and then hit enter, you'll delete the
original message. Type a lowercase q to exit your mailbox.

If you type a q without first hitting d, your message is transferred to a
file called mbox. This file is where all read, but un-deleted, messages
go. If you want to leave it in your mailbox for now, type a lowercase x
and hit enter. This gets you out of mail without making any changes.
The mbox file works a lot like your mailbox. To access it, type

mail -f mbox

at your host system's command line and hit enter.

You'll get a menu identical to the one in your mailbox from which you can
read these old messages, delete them or respond to them. It's probably a
good idea to clear out your mailbox and mbox file from time to time, if
only to keep them uncluttered.

Are there any drawbacks to e-mail? There are a few. One is that people
seem more willing to fly off the handle electronically than in person, or
over the phone. Maybe it's because it's so easy to hit r and reply to a
message without pausing and reflecting a moment. That's why we have
smileys (see section 2.4)! There's no online equivalent yet of a return
receipt: chances are your message got to where it's going, but there's no
absolute way for you to know for sure unless you get a reply from the
other person.

So now you're ready to send e-mail to other people on the Net. Of
course, you need somebody's address to send them mail. How do you get
it?

Alas, the simplest answer is not what you'd call the most elegant: you
call them up on the phone or write them a letter on paper and ask them.
Residents of the electronic frontier are only beginning to develop the
equivalent of phone books, and the ones that exist today are far from
complete (still, later on, in Chapter 6, we'll show you how to use some
of these directories).

Eventually, you'll start corresponding with people, which means you'll
want to know how to address mail to them. It's vital to know how to do
this, because the smallest mistake -- using a comma when you should have
used a period, for instance, can bounce the message back to you,
undelivered. In this sense, Net addresses are like phone numbers: one
wrong digit and you get the wrong person. Fortunately, most net
addresses now adhere to a relatively easy-to-understand system.

Earlier, you sent yourself a mail message using just your user-name.
This was sort of like making a local phone call -- you didn't have to
dial a 1 or an area code. This also works for mail to anybody else who
has an account on the same system as you.

Sending mail outside of your system, though, will require the use of the
Net equivalent of area codes, called "domains." A basic Net address will
look something like this:

tomg@world.std.com

Tomg is somebody's user ID, and he is at (hence the @ sign) a site (or in
Internetese, a "domain") known as std.com. Large organizations often
have more than one computer linked to the Internet; in this case, the
name of the particular machine is world (you will quickly notice that,
like boat owners, Internet computer owners always name their machines).

Domains tell you the name of the organization that runs a given e-mail
site and what kind of site it is or, if it's not in the U.S., what
country it's located in. Large organizations may have more than one
computer or gateway tied to the Internet, so you'll often see a two-part
domain name; and sometimes even three- or four-part domain names.

In general, American addresses end in an organizational suffix, such as
".edu" (which means the site is at a college or university). Other
American suffixes include:

.com for businesses
.org for non-profit organizations
.gov and .mil for government and military agencies
.net for companies or organizations that run large networks.

Sites in the rest of the world tend to use a two-letter code that
represents their country. Most make sense, such as .ca for Canadian
sites, but there are a couple of seemingly odd ones (at least to
Americans). Swiss sites end in .ch, while South African ones end in .za.
A few U.S. sites have followed this international convention (such as
nred.reading.ma.us).

You'll notice that the above addresses are all in lower-case. Unlike
almost everything else having anything at all to do with Unix, most Net
mailing systems don't care about case, so you generally don't have to
worry about capitalizing e-mail addresses. Alas, there are a few
exceptions -- some public-access sites do allow for capital letters in
user names. When in doubt, ask the person you want to write to, or let
her send you a message first (recall how a person's e-mail address is
usually found on the top of her message). The domain name, the part of
the address after the @ sign, never has to be capitalized.

It's all a fairly simple system that works very well, except, again, it's
vital to get the address exactly right -- just as you have to dial a
phone number exactly right. Send a message to tomg@unm.edu (which is the
University of New Mexico) when you meant to send it to tomg@umn.edu (the
University of Minnesota), and your letter will either bounce back to you
undelivered, or go to the wrong person.

If your message is bounced back to you as undeliverable, you'll get an
ominous looking-message from MAILER-DAEMON (actually a rather benign Unix
program that exists to handle mail), with an evil-looking header followed
by the text of your message. Sometimes, you can tell what went wrong by
looking at the first few lines of the bounced message. Besides an
incorrect address, it's possible your host system does not have the other
site in the "map" it maintains of other host systems. Or you could be
trying to send mail to another network, such as Bitnet or CompuServe,
that has special addressing requirements.

Sometimes, figuring all this out can prove highly frustrating. But
remember the prime Net commandment: Ask. Send a message to your system
administrator. Include a copy of the header from the original message.
He or she might be able to help decipher the problem.

There is one kind of address that may give your host system particular
problems. There are two main ways that Unix systems exchange mail. One
is known as UUCP and started out with a different addressing system than
the rest of the Net. Most UUCP systems have since switched over to the
standard Net addressing system, but a few traditional sites still cling
to their original type, which tends to have lots of exclamation points in
it, like this:

uunet!somesite!othersite!mybuddy

The problem for many host sites is that exclamation points (also known as
"bangs") now mean something special in the more common systems or
"shells" used to operate many Unix computers. This means that addressing
mail to such a site (or even responding to a message you received from
one) could confuse the poor computer to no end and your message never
gets sent out. If that happens, try putting backslashes in front of each
exclamation point, so that you get an address that looks like this:

uunet\!somesite\!othersite\!mybuddy

Note that this means you may not be able to respond to such a message by
typing a lowercase r -- you may get an error message and you'll have to
create a brand-new message.

If you want to get a taste of what's possible on the Net, start a message
to this address:

president@whitehouse.gov

Compose some well wishes (or grumblings, if you're so inclined). Send
off the message, and within a few seconds to a few hours (depending on
the state of your Net connection), you'll get back a reply that your
message has been received. If you don't feel like starting at the top,
send a message instead to

vice-president@whitehouse.gov

The "mail" program is actually a very powerful one and a Netwide
standard, at least on Unix computers. But it can be hard to figure out -
- you can type a question mark to get a list of commands, but these may
be of limited use unless you're already familiar with Unix. Fortunately,
there are a couple of other mail programs that are easier to use.

2.2 ELM -- A BETTER WAY

Elm is a combination mailbox and letter-writing system that uses menus to
help you navigate through mail. Most Unix-based host systems now have it
online. To use it, type

elm

and hit enter. You'll get a menu of your waiting mail, along with a list
of commands you can execute, that will look something like this:

Mailbox is '/usr/spool/mail/adamg' with 38 messages [ELM 2.3 PL11]

1 Sep 1 Christopher Davis (13) here's another message.
2 Sep 1 Christopher Davis (91) This is a message from Eudora
3 Aug 31 Rita Marie Rouvali (161) First Internet Hunt !!! (fwd)
4 Aug 31 Peter Scott/Manage (69) New File <UK077> University of Londo
5 Aug 30 Peter Scott/Manage (64) New File <DIR020> X.500 service at A
6 Aug 30 Peter Scott/Manage (39) New File <NET016> DATAPAC Informatio
7 Aug 28 Peter Scott/Manage (67) Proposed Usenet group for HYTELNET n
8 Aug 28 Peter Scott/Manage (56) New File <DIR019> JANET Public Acces
9 Aug 26 Helen Trillian Ros (15) Tuesday
10 Aug 26 Peter Scott/Manage (151) Update <CWK004> Oxford University OU

You can use any of the following commands by pressing the first character;
d)elete or u)ndelete mail, m)ail a message, r)eply or f)orward mail, q)uit
To read a message, press <return>. j = move down, k = move up, ? = help

Each line shows the date you received the message, who sent it, how many
lines long the message is, and the message's subject.

If you are using VT100 or similar emulation, you can move up and down the
menu with your up and down arrow keys. Otherwise, type the line number
of the message you want to read or delete and hit enter.

When you read a message, it pauses every 24 lines, instead of scrolling
until it's done. Hit the space bar to read the next page. You can type
a lowercase r to reply or a lower-case q or i to get back to the menu
(the I stands for "index").

At the main menu, hitting a lowercase m followed by enter will let you
start a message. To delete a message, type a lower-case d. You can do
this while reading the message. Or, if you are in the menu, move the
cursor to the message's line and then hit d.

When you're done with elm, type a lower-case q. The program will ask if
you really want to delete the messages you marked. Then, it will ask you
if you want to move any messages you've read but haven't marked for
deletion to a "received" file. For now, hit your n key. Elm has
a potentially major disadvantage for the beginner. The default text
editor it often generally calls up when you hit your r or m key is often
a program called emacs. Unixoids swear by emacs, but everybody else
almost always finds it impossible. Unfortunately, you can't always get
away from it (or vi, another text editor often found on Unix systems), so
later on we'll talk about some basic commands that will keep you from
going totally nuts. If you're lucky, though, your system administrator
will have changed emacs to Pico, a much easier to use text processor
(more on that in the Pine section below).

If you want to save a message to your own computer, hit s, either within
the message or with your cursor on the message entry in the elm menu. A
filename will pop up. If you do not like it, type a new name (you won't
have to backspace). Hit enter, and the message will be saved with that
file name in your "home directory" on your host system. After you exit
elm, you can now download it (ask your system administrator for specifics
on how to download -- and upload -- such files).

2.3 PINE -- AN EVEN BETTER WAY

Pine is based on elm but includes a number of improvements that make it
an ideal mail system for beginners. Like elm, pine starts you with a
menu. It also has an "address book" feature that is handy for people
with long or complex e-mail addresses. Hitting A at the main menu puts
you in the address book, where you can type in the person's first name
(or nickname) followed by her address. Then, when you want to send that
person a message, you only have to type in her first name or nickname,
and Pine automatically inserts her actual address. The address book
also lets you set up a mailing list. This feature allows you to send the
same message to a number of people at once.

What really sets Pine apart is its built-in text editor, which looks and
feels a lot more like word-processing programs available for MS-DOS and
Macintosh users. Not only does it have word wrap (a revolutionary
concept if ever there was one), it also has a spell-checker and a search
command. Best of all, all of the commands you need are listed in a two-
line mini-menu at the bottom of each screen. The commands look like
this:

^W Where is

The little caret is a synonym for the key marked "control" on your
keyboard. To find where a particular word is in your document, hit
control-w (depress your control key, then hit w) you'd hit your control
key and your W key at the same time, which would bring up a prompt asking
you for the word to look for. Some of Pine's commands are a tad peculiar
(control-V for "page down" for example), which comes from being based on
a variant of the emacs text processor (which is utterly peculiar). But
again, all of the commands you need are listed on that two-line mini-
menu, so it shouldn't take you more than a couple of seconds to find the
right one. To use Pine, type

pine

at the command line and hit enter.

2.4 SMILEYS

When you're involved in an online discussion, you can't see the smiles or
shrugs that the other person might make in a live conversation to show
he's only kidding. But online, there's no body language. So what you
might think is funny, somebody else might take as an insult. To try to
keep such misunderstandings from erupting into bitter disputes, we have
smileys. Tilt your head to the left and look at the following sideways.
:-). Or simply :). This is your basic "smiley." Use it to indicate
people should not take that comment you just made as seriously as they
might otherwise. You make a smiley by typing a colon, a hyphen and a
right parenthetical bracket. Some people prefer using the word "grin,"
usually in this form:

<grin>

Sometimes, though, you'll see it as *grin* or even just <g> for short.

Some other smileys include:

;-) Wink;
:-( Frown;
:-O Surprise;
8-) Wearing glasses;
=|:-)= Abe Lincoln.

OK, so maybe the last two are a little bogus :-).

2.5 SENDING E-MAIL TO OTHER NETWORKS

There are a number of computer networks that are not directly part of the
Net, but which are now connected through "gateways" that allow the
passing of e-mail. Here's a list of some of the larger networks, how to
send mail to them and how their users can send mail to you:

America Online
--------------

Remove any spaces from a user's name and append "@aol.com," to get

user@aol.com

America Online users who want to send mail to you need only put your
Net address in the "to:" field before composing a message.

ATTMail
-------

Address your message to user@attmail.com.

From ATTMail, a user would send mail to you in this form:

internet!domain!user

So if your address were nancyr@world.std.com, your correspondent would
send a message to you at

internet!world.std.com!nancyr

Bitnet
------

Users of Bitnet (and NetNorth in Canada and EARN in Europe) often have
addresses in this form: IZZY@INDVMS. If you're lucky, all you'll have to
do to mail to that address is add "bitnet" at the end, to get
izzy@indvms.bitnet. Sometimes, however, mail to such an address will
bounce back to you, because Bitnet addresses do not always translate well
into an Internet form. If this happens, you can send mail through one of
two Internet/Bitnet gateways. First, change the @ in the address to a %,
so that you get username%site.bitnet. Then add either @vm.marist.edu or
@cunyvm.cuny.edu, so that, with the above example, you would get
izzy%indyvms.bitnet@vm.marist.edu or izzy%indvyvms.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu

Bitnet users have it a little easier: They can usually send mail directly
to your e-mail address without fooling around with it at all. So send
them your address and they should be OK.

CompuServe
----------

CompuServe users have numerical addresses in this form: 73727,545.
To send mail to a CompuServe user, change the comma to a period and add
"@compuserve.com"; for example: 73727.545@compuserve.com.

Note that many CompuServe users must pay extra to receive mail from the
Internet.

If you know CompuServe users who want to send you mail, tell them to GO
MAIL and create a mail message. In the address area, instead of typing in
a CompuServe number, have them type your address in this form:

INTERNET:YourID@YourAddress.

For example, INTERNET:adamg@world.std.com.

Delphi
------

To send mail to a Delphi user, the form is username@delphi.com.

Fidonet
-------

To send mail to people using a Fidonet BBS, you need the name they use to
log onto that system and its "node number.'' Fidonet node numbers or
addresses consist of three numbers, in this form: 1:322/190. The first
number tells which of several broad geographic zones the BBS is in (1
represents the U.S. and Canada, 2 Europe and Israel, 3 Pacific Asia, 4
South America). The second number represents the BBS's network, while
the final number is the BBS's "FidoNode'' number in that network. If your
correspondent only gives you two numbers (for example, 322/190), it means
the system is in zone 1.

Now comes the tricky part. You have to reverse the numbers and add to
them the letters f, n and z (which stand for "FidoNode,''"network,'' and
"zone'). For example, the address above would become

f190.n322.z1.

Now add "fidonet.org'' at the end, to get f190.n322.z1.fidonet.org. Then
add "FirstName.LastName@', to get

FirstName.LastName@f190.n322.z1.fidonet.org

Note the period between the first and last names. Also, some countries
now have their own Fidonet "backbone" systems, which might affect
addressing. For example, were the above address in Germany, you would
end it with "fido.de" instead of "fidonet.org."

Whew!

The reverse process is totally different. First, the person has to have
access to his or her BBS's "net mail" area and know the Fidonet address
of his or her local Fidonet/UUCP gateway (often their system operator
will know it). Your Fidonet correspondent should address a net-mail
message to UUCP (not your name) in the "to:" field. In the node-number
field, they should type in the node number of the Fidonet/UUCP gateway
(if the gateway system is in the same regional network as their system,
they need only type the last number, for example, 390 instead of
322/390). Then, the first line of the message has to be your Internet
address, followed by a blank line. After that, the person can write the
message and send it.

Because of the way Fidonet moves mail, it could take a day or two for a
message to be delivered in either direction. Also, because many Fidonet
systems are run as hobbies, it is considered good form to ask the gateway
sysop's permission if you intend to pass large amounts of mail back and
forth. Messages of a commercial nature are strictly forbidden (even if
it's something the other person asked for). Also, consider it very likely
that somebody other than the recipient will read your messages.

GEnie
-----

To send mail to a GEnie user, add "@genie.geis.com" to the end of the
GEnie user name, for example: walt@genie.geis.com.

MCIMail
-------

To send mail to somebody with an MCIMail account, add "@mcimail.com to
the end of their name or numerical address. For example:

555-1212@mcimail.com

or

jsmith@mcimail.com

Note that if there is more than one MCIMail subscriber with that name,
you will get a mail message back from MCI giving you their names and
numerical addresses. You'll then have to figure out which one you want
and re-send the message.

From MCI, a user would type

Your Name (EMS)

at the "To:" prompt. At the EMS prompt, he or she would type

internet

followed by your Net address at the "Mbx:" prompt.

Prodigy
-------

UserID@prodigy.com. Note that Prodigy users must pay extra for
Internet e-mail.

2.6 SEVEN UNIX COMMANDS YOU CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT

If you connect to the Net through a Unix system, eventually you'll have
to come to terms with Unix. For better or worse, most Unix systems do
NOT shield you from their inner workings -- if you want to copy a Usenet
posting to a file, for example, you'll have to use some Unix commands if
you ever want to do anything with that file.

Like MS-DOS, Unix is an operating system - it tells the computer how to
do things. Now while Unix may have a reputation as being even more
complex than MS-DOS, in most cases, a few basic, and simple, commands
should be all you'll ever need.

If your own computer uses MS-DOS or PC-DOS, the basic concepts will seem
very familiar -- but watch out for the cd command, which works
differently enough from the similarly named DOS command that it will
drive you crazy. Also, unlike MS-DOS, Unix is case sensitive -- if you
type commands or directory names in the wrong case, you'll get an error
message.

If you're used to working on a Mac, you'll have to remember that Unix
stores files in "directories" rather than "folders." Unix directories
are organized like branches on a tree. At the bottom is the "root"
directory, with sub-directories branching off that (and sub-directories
in turn can have sub-directories). The Mac equivalent of a Unix sub-
directory is a folder within another folder.

cat ROUGHLY Equivalent to the MS-DOS "type" command. To pause a file
every screen, type

cat file |more

where "file" is the name of the file you want to see (and
| is the thing that looks like an overgrown colon).
Hitting control-C will stop the display. Alternately,
you could type

more file

to achieve the same result. You can also use cat for
writing or uploading text files to your name or home
directory (similar to the MS-DOS "copy con" command). If
you type

cat>test

you start a file called "test." You can either write
something simple (no editing once you've finished a line and
you have to hit return at the end of each line) or upload
something into that file using your communications software's
ASCII protocol). To close the file, hit control-D.

cd The "change directory" command. To change from your present
directory to another, type

cd directory

and hit enter. Unlike MS-DOS, which uses a \ to denote sub-
directories (for example: \stuff\text), Unix uses a / (for
example: /stuff/text). So to change from your present
directory to the stuff/text sub-directory, you would type

cd stuff/text

and then hit enter. As in MS-DOS, you do not need the first
backslash if the subdirectory comes off the directory you're
already in. To move back up a directory tree, you would type

cd ..

followed by enter. Note the space between the cd and the two
periods -- this is where MS-DOS users will really go nuts.

cp Copies a file. The syntax is

cp file1 file2

which would copy file1 to file2 (or overwrite file2 with
file1).

ls This command, when followed by enter, tells you what's in the
directory, similar to the DOS dir command, except in
alphabetical order.

ls | more

will stop the listing every 24 lines -- handy if there are a
lot of things in the directory. The basic ls command does not
list "hidden" files, such as the .login file that controls
how your system interacts with Unix. To see these files, type

ls -a or ls -a | more

ls -l will tell you the size of each file in bytes and tell
you when each was created or modified.

mv Similar to the MS-DOS rename AND MOVE commands.

mv file1 file2

will rename file1 as file2, The command can
also be used to move files between directories.

mv file1 News

would move file1 to your News directory.

rm Deletes a file. Type

rm filename

and hit enter (but beware: when you hit enter, it's gone for
good).

WILDCARDS: When searching for, copying or deleting files, you can use
"wildcards" if you are not sure of the file's exact name.

ls man*

would find the following files:

manual, manual.txt, man-o-man.

Use a question mark when you're sure about all but one or two characters.
For example,

ls man?

would find a file called mane, but not one called manual.

2.7 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

* You send a message but get back an ominous looking message from
MAILER-DAEMON containing up to several dozen lines of computerese
followed by your message.

Somewhere in those lines you can often find a clue to what went
wrong. You might have made a mistake in spelling the e-mail address.
The site to which you're sending mail might have been down for
maintenance or a problem. You may have used the wrong "translation" for
mail to a non-Internet network.

* You call up your host system's text editor to write a message or reply
to one and can't seem to get out.

If it's emacs, try control-X, control-C DELETE(in other words, hit your
control key and your X key at the same time, followed by control and C).
If worse comes to worse, you can hang up.

* In elm, you accidentally hit the D key for a message you want to save.

Type the number of the message, hit enter and then U, which will "un-
delete" the message. This works only before you exit Elm; once you quit,
the message is gone.

* You try to upload an ASCII message you've written on your own computer
into a message you're preparing in Elm or Pine and you get a lot of left
brackets, capital Ms, Ks and Ls and some funny-looking characters.

Believe it or not, your message may actually wind up looking fine; all
that garbage is temporary and reflects the problems some Unix text
processors have with ASCII uploads. But it will take much longer for
your upload to finish. One way to deal with this is to call up the
simple mail program, which will not produce any weird characters when you
upload a text file into a message. Another way (which is better if your
prepared message is a response to somebody's mail), is to create a text
file on your host system with cat, for example,

cat>file

and then upload your text into that. Then, in elm or pine, you can
insert the message with a simple command (control-R in pine, for
example); only this time you won't see all that extraneous stuff.

* You haven't cleared out your Elm mailbox in awhile, and you
accidentally hit "y" when you meant to hit "n" (or vice-versa) when
exiting and now all your messages have disappeared.

The system has put all the messages in a file called received in your
Mail directory. To get to the messages, call up Elm again, and hit your
c key. You'll be asked which folder to change to. Type

=received

and hit enter. You'll be prompted as if you're about to exit Elm; when
done answering the questions, you'll get a menu of messages in your
receive folder. You can reply to them, delete them, etc., as you would
normally.