HELP MAILRC Aaron Sloman Nov 1993 These facilities require uses vedmail If you use the unix mailer you can have a file in your login directory called .mailrc which contains two lots of information (a) Definitions of email aliases so that when sending mail you can refer to people via names that you find easy to remember, rather than their full email addresses. (b) Commands to control the behaviour of the unix mail program if you use it. CONTENTS - (Use g to access required sections) -- Defining email aliases -- The ENTER aliases command -- Commands to control the Unix mail program -- Further reading -- Defining email aliases --------------------------------------------- The .mailrc file can define email aliases in the format alias name1 name2 name3 name4 ...... Then if you send mail to the abbreviation it will actually go to all the names listed. Note that the names are separated by spaces, not commas. If one of the names is itself an alias which is defined elsewhere in the file then the alias will also be "expanded". So you can define four aliase lists, called, e.g. list1, list2, list3 and list4, each for a different group of people, and then if you often want to send mail to all of them you could use an alias called list_all defined thus: alias list_all list1 list2 list3 list4 Here are some example aliases that may be useful for Poplog users at Birmingham. The full addresses have been given so that these can be used on Sun1. If you are already on the Computer Science network you can leave out all occurrences of "@cs.bham.ac.uk" Some teaching staff: alias aaron_sloman A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk alias jim_yandle J.R.Yandle@cs.bham.ac.uk alias david_pym D.J.Pym@cs.bham.ac.uk alias louise_pryor L.M.Pryor@cs.bham.ac.uk Some systems staff: alias keith_marlow K.A.Marlow@cs.bham.ac.uk alias bert_dandy B.L.Dandy@cs.bham.ac.uk alias steve_pillinger S.M.Pillinger@cs.bham.ac.uk alias richard_pannell R.Pannell@cs.bham.ac.uk alias andy_williams A.Williams@cs.bham.ac.uk Some demonstrators: alias tim_read T.M.Read@cs.bham.ac.uk alias christian_paterson C.J.Paterson@cs.bham.ac.uk alias ed_shing E.Shing@cs.bham.ac.uk alias ian_wright I.P.Wright@cs.bham.ac.uk Some others: alias bob_hendley R.J.Hendley@cs.bham.ac.uk alias tom_axford T.H.Axford@cs.bham.ac.uk alias barbara_davies B.J.Davies@cs.bham.ac.uk Some group aliases: On the School of Computer Science network there are some group aliases available which can be accessed from Sun1 as follows: alias poplog-users poplog-users@cs.bham.ac.uk alias advice advice@cs.bham.ac.uk alias unix-users unix-ug@bham.ac.uk -- The ENTER aliases command ------------------------------------------ In VED there is a command for finding out about email aliases available on the Computer Science network. It does not work on Sun1. It is ENTER aliases It is described fully in HELP VED_ALIASES -- Commands to control the Unix mail program -------------------------- This section can be ignored if you always read and send mail from inside VED. The full set of commands for this purpose is described in the Unix "man" file "man mail" on the Computer Science suns, and "man mailx" on Sun1. You can read man files in VED using the "ENTER man" command, e.g. ENTER man mailx Besides the facilities in VED there are several Unix mail "front-ends" i.e. programs for reading and sending mail. For many users the default is set up (e.g. in their .cshrc file) so that the unix mail command gets the Berkeley Unix mailer, as that is in many ways more convenient than the other standard Unix mailer. It is sometimes known as "mailx", e.g. on sun1. Some of the most useful commands to control the behaviour of the Berkeley Unix mailer are the following: set autoprint If set this will mean that if you delete a message the next message is automatically printed set crt This means that long messages will be printed via the "more" command, which shows only a screenful at a time. set askcc If you send mail using the Berkeley mailer this will cause it to ask you if you want copies of the message to go to anyone. I.e. it will prompt you for a "Cc:" list. set asksub This causes the mailer to ask you for a Subject: line for the message. ignore Message-Id Received Mmdf-Warning Reply-To X-Errors-To Via ignore Original-Sender Status X-Face X-Mailer X-Envelope-To X400-Received These commands tell the Berkeley mailer not to show mail header lines starting with the keywords given. -- Further reading ---------------------------------------------------- HELP * SEND HELP * VED_GETMAIL HELP * VED_ALIASES SHOWLIB * VED_ALIAS --- $poplocal/local/help/mailrc --- The University of Birmingham 1993. --------------------------------