===================================== Sending and Receiving mail on ACADAIX ===================================== -IAN! idallen@ncf.ca ACADAIX student accounts contain a file named ".forward" whose contents forward all your email to the main Algonqin email server. You normally won't ever receive any email on ACADAIX because of this. If you want to bypass this forwarding temporarily, you can preface an ACADAIX userid with a backslash (two backslashes, if you're typing into a Unix shell). For example, to send mail on ACADAIX: $ mail \\abcd0001 Subject: this message will not be forwarded Hi! Userid abcd0001 can read this using the ACADAIX mail command. ^D $ If you want to send mail to ACADAIX from another machine, the backslash trick still works; but, you must specify the full ACADAIX host name: $ mail \\abcd0001@acadaix.algonquincollege.com Subject: this message will not be forwarded Hi! Userid abcd0001 can read this using the ACADAIX mail command. ^D $ If you are typing an email address directly into a mail program (such as Netscape Messenger, Pine, Eudora, etc.), you don't need to double the backslash. One is sufficient: \abcd0001@acadaix.algonquincollege.com Only use double backslashes if typing at the Unix Shell. If you want to permanently disable the ACADAIX forwarding of email to your main Algonquin account, you can remove or rename the .forward file in your ACADAIX $HOME directory. You can also put two addresses into the file, so that your email goes to two places, e.g. \alleni alleni@algonquincollege.com The above contents of my .forward file means that email sent to me on ACADAIX will go both into my real ACADAIX mailbox as well as having a copy of the email sent to my main College mailbox. Note the use of the backslash on the local address to prevent further forwarding. ===================================== Reading your College Email on ACADAIX ===================================== The "fetchmail" program available under Linux has not been compiled and installed on ACADAIX, so you can't use it to get a copy of your main Algonquin email for reading on ACADAIX. (Since the source code to this program is available, you could download it and try to get it to compile yourself, if you're adventurous!) However, you can use FTP to pick up a copy of your waiting email from the main server at inmail.algonquincollege.com. Here's how I did it on ACADAIX: $ ftp inmail.algonquincollege.com Connected to inmail.algonquincollege.com. 220 inmail FTP server (SunOS 5.7) ready. Name (inmail.algonquincollege.com:alleni): 331 Password required for alleni. Password: cd /var/mail 250 CWD command successful. ftp> get alleni foo 200 PORT command successful. 150 ASCII data connection for alleni (192.197.88.4,4838) (53496 bytes). 226 ASCII Transfer complete. 54839 bytes received in 0.1189 seconds (450.3 Kbytes/s) local: foo remote: alleni ftp> quit 221 Goodbye. Now the file "foo" on your local machine has a copy of all your email. You can tell the mail program to open this file by using the "-f" option: $ mail -f foo Mail [5.2 UCB] [AIX 4.1] Type ? for help. "foo": 17 messages 17 new [...your email is here...] The above method works on ACADAIX and on any other Unix/Linux system that has the "ftp" and "mail" commands (including Floppix). Your downloaded email file is plain ASCII text. That means you can also use many other Unix commands on it, e.g.: more foo head foo tail foo wc foo grep '^From' foo cp foo bar diff foo bar [...etc...]