Your address

  your-login-name@camlab.math.uci.edu

Forwarding your mail to another address

  .forward

To deactivate forwarding, delete this file:

  rm .forward

Note that you can send mail from your CAMLAB account even if your incoming mail is forwarded to another address.

E-mail programs

mail or Mail: The no-nonsense solution.

mail offers no ``modern amenities,'' in particular, it has very limited editing capabilities. However, in many situation it is still the preferred mode of operation:

• Quick-and-dirty mails - you don't waste a key-stroke.
• If you are logged in via a slow remote connection, or when your terminal mode isn't set correctly.
• To send files via e-mail. Note, however, that files containing non-ascii characters can be messed up badly if they are not mime encoded or uuencoded.

Usage: mail is started from the Unix shell. Type mail to read mail. At the prompt, type

• RET to read the next message, or type the number of the message you want to read,
• r to reply to the current message,
• ? for a complete list of commands,
• x to exit without making any changes to your mailbox (recommended if you normally read your mail with a different mail reader), or q to apply changes to your mailbox and quit.

You read mail which has been saved by mail or another mail program. mail's save file is named mbox by default. For example, if you are normally using Netscape mail, but are logged in remotely and cannot start Netscape, type

  mail -f nsmail/Inbox

to read your Netscape Inbox folder.

To send a mail, type, from the Unix shell,

  mail address

to send a mail to address - when you finish with your letter, type a single . (period) on a line by itself. If you want to send a file by e-mail, use

  mail -s 'subject of mail here' address < filename

Note: mail is the original Unix mail program, Mail is an improved version from the Berkeley system distribution. Most likely, you will be using Mail by default, even if you type mail. If not, it is strongly recommended to set up an alias for Mail by adding the line

  alias mail 'Mail'

to your .cshrc file.

Netscape Mail: The comfortable solution.

The Netscape web browser includes a very comfortable mail and news reader. The use is pretty intuitive - explore it yourself by clicking on the mail icon on the right bottom corner of your netscape window.

Advantages:

• Graphical user interface,
• can display mime of html encoded messages,
• will display URLs as hotlinks.
• you can use Netscape to read your mail even if you receive your mail on a remote machine. For instructions of how to set this up, click here.

Disadvantages:

• Unless you never log in via a slow connection, or from an ascii terminal, you will need to be able to a fall-back mail reader. Fortunately, Netscape and mail can live together fairly peacefully, see the notes above.
• If you just want to try out the mail reader, be aware that, by default, Netscape empties your incoming mail file and puts all your incoming mail and puts it into the mail file

    ~/nsmail/Inbox
  

  You can customize Netscape's behavior if you don't like this.

Pine: The compromise.

Advantages:

• Menu driven, more powerful than mail,
• works the always the same, whether logged in via a bad phone connection, or on an SGI console. So some people like it because they only need to learn on mail handler.

Disadvantages:

• Is fairly sensitive to proper terminal type set-up and may behave strange if the terminal does not have the right number of lines. Thus, it does not have the degree of reliability that mail provides,
• does not the offer the choice of encodings that Netscape provides,
• trial use can mess up your incoming mail file...

Emacs Mail: Best for writing mails.

Usage:

• To send mail: Enter Emacs and type C-x m. Write the letter, and type C-c C-c to send it .
• To read mail: Read the warning below, then select ``Read Mail'' from the ``Tools'' menu.

Advantages:

• The editing capabilities of Emacs are far superior to any of the build-in editors of other mail programs.
• You can use the editing advantages of emacs for important mails even if you normally use another mail program.
• You can very easily send variations of the same mail to different recipients. After sending one version, select the *mail* buffer from the ``Buffers'' menu and make the changes you want.
• If you like the mh mail handler, you can use it from within Emacs.

Disadvantages:

• The emacs mail reader rmailis fairly idiosyncratic, and has a directory structure which is not well compatible with other mail readers.
• The same goes for mh. Be very careful if you just want to ``try'' these programs to read mail (writing mails within emacs is harmless!), especially if you have the habit of leaving lots of incoming mails in your mail spool file.