Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet - Electronic Frontier Foundation (reading rainbow books .txt) 📗

uplifting.

This particular “mail server” is run by Oregon State University.

Its main purpose is actually to provide a way to distribute agricultural

information via e-mail. If you’d like to find out how to use the

server’s full range of services, send a message to its address with this

line in it:

send help

You’ll quickly get back a lengthy document detailing just what’s

available and how to get it.

Feeling opinionated? Want to give the President of the United

States a piece of your mind? Send a message to president@whitehouse.gov.

Or if the vice president will do, write 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 University of Londo

5 Aug 30 Peter Scott/Manage (64) New File X.500 service at A

6 Aug 30 Peter Scott/Manage (39) New File DATAPAC Informatio

7 Aug 28 Peter Scott/Manage (67) Proposed Usenet group for HYTELNET n

8 Aug 28 Peter Scott/Manage (56) New File JANET Public Acces

9 Aug 26 Helen Trillian Ros (15) Tuesday

10 Aug 26 Peter Scott/Manage (151) Update 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 . 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 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 major disadvantage for the beginner. The default text

editor it 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 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, 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

emacs (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. It’s a relatively new program, so

some systems may not yet have it online. But it’s so easy to use, you

should probably send e-mail to your system administrator urging him to

get it!

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:

Sometimes, though, you’ll see it as grin or even just 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 some 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,