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MAIL(1) General Commands Manual MAIL(1) NAME mail - send or receive mail SYNOPSIS mail [ -mpren ] [ -f file ] mail [ -# ] person ... mail /usr/lib/upas/gone.fishing [ mesg ] DESCRIPTION Printing Mail When persons are not named, mail displays your incoming computer mail. The options are: -r Print mail in first-in, first-out order. -p Print all the mail messages without prompting for commands. -m Use a manual style of interface, i.e., print no messages unless directed to. -f file Use file, e.g. as if it were the mailbox. -e Check silently if there is anything in the mailbox; return zero (true) if so, non-zero otherwise. -n Announce mail to the control terminal when it arrives. Do not print mail now. Mail prints a user's mail, message by message, prompting between mes- sages. After printing a prompt mail reads a line from the standard in- put to direct disposition of the message. Commands, as in ed(1), are of the form `[range] command [arguments]'. The command is applied to each message in the (optional) range addressed by message number and/or regular expressions in the style of regexp(3). A regular expression in slashes searches among header (postmark) lines; an expression in back- slashes searches on message content. address to indicate a single message header address,address to indicate a range of contiguous message headers g/expression/ to indicate all message headers matching the regular expres- sion. The commands are: b Print the headers for the next ten messages. d Mark message for deletion on exiting mail. h Print the disposition, size in characters, and header line of the message. m person ... Mail the message to the named persons. M person ... Same as m except that lines typed on the terminal (termi- nated by EOT or are prepended to the message. p Print message. An interrupt stops the printing. r Reply to the sender of the message. R Like but with the message appended to the reply. s file (Save) Append the message to the named file default, in HOME directory if known, see environ(5)). q Put undeleted mail back in the mailbox and stop. EOT (control-D) Same as w file Same as s with the mail header line(s) stripped. u Remove mark for deletion. x Exit, without changing the mailbox file. ? Print a command summary. |command Run the command with the message as standard input. !command Escape to the shell to do command. = Print the number of the current message. Sending Mail When persons are named, mail takes the standard input up to an end-of- file, or (if input is from a terminal) to a line consisting of a single and adds it to each person's mailbox. The message is automatically postmarked with the sender's name and date. Lines that look like post- marks are prefixed with Person is a login name on the local system or a network name for a re- mote system; see mail(6). Option -# does not send mail, but reports instead how the mail would be sent: the sender, the next machine to handle the mail, and the recipi- ent's address relative to that machine. The report reflects address translation; see mail(6) and upas(8). Sh(1) and vismon(9.1) have mechanisms for timely notification of incom- ing mail. Mailboxes Each user owns a mailbox for incoming mail, normally /usr/spool/mail/person. Mail creates mailboxes as necessary, and never removes them. Mailboxes are created readable but not writable by oth- ers. For more privacy, a mailbox's owner may make it unreadable; see chmod(2). If a mailbox contains the sole line Forward to name, mail for that mailbox is sent instead to name. Name may be a list of names. If the mailbox contains Pipe to command the mail is sent to the standard input of command instead of being ap- pended to the mailbox. The command is run with the userid and groupid of the mailbox's owner. The command is sent (see signal(2)) after two minutes. (On System V machines, the set userid bit must be set.) Mail checks centralized forwarding lists before looking in mailboxes. If you have accounts on many machines, but wish to receive mail on only one, it is usually easier to register in forwarding lists than to in- stall in many mailboxes; see upas(8). To use mail as an answering machine while you are away, replace the contents of your mailbox with a single line like Pipe to /usr/lib/upas/gone.fishing /usr/you/mesg The mesg file will be sent (just once) to everyone who sends you mail; arriving messages will be collected in gone.mail in your home direc- tory. If you do not name a mesg file, will be used by default. FILES mail log file mailboxes to identify sender and locate persons saved mail unmailable text the program for editing mail the program for sending mail a link to used to receive remote mail list of senders answered by gone.fishing SEE ALSO write(1), vismon(9.1), uucp(1), verify(1), mail(6), upas(8), smtp(8) BUGS Long headers are truncated for header search. Backslash quoting is impossible in content regular expressions. MAIL(1)