SFINX software tree - electronic mail

This is an overview of the various e-mail utilities available at Leiden Observatory, as well as a short description of general features of Internet Mail.

General features

E-mail addresses

E-mail addresses on the Internet always look like user@domain. In our case, the addresses are user@strw.leidenuniv.nl.

See also the page about the e-mail aliases database at the Observatory.

[Note that addresses like user@machine.strw.leidenuniv.nl or user@subcluster.strw.leidenuniv.nl are discouraged. The old addresses user@strwchem.leidenuniv.nl and user@cosmos.leidenuniv.nl are no longer valid.]

Mail programs

UNIX mail

Mail is the basic UNIX mail program. It can read and write mail, and has some sort of index to browse through your mailbox. Configuration options can be placed in .mailrc.

By default, mail will not use an editor to edit mail, but you can type ~e to invoke the editor indicated by $EDITOR.

Elm

This program has become the standard mail utility at Leiden Observatory. It is easy to use, yet it works even on the most simple screen, since it uses a menu in text mode. Also, there are many useful utilities that are part of the Elm package.

Therefore, there is a separate page about Elm.

PINE

Another screen-oriented mail utility. It might be more powerful than Elm, but it has its own address book format, and there is no easy way to convert between the two.

At the moment, PINE is only availabel on the Sun and Linux workstations. BTW, PINE stands for "Program for Internet News and Email", so yes, it's a newsreader too.

The MH family

MH (Message Handler) is a bit strange; there is no mh command, but it consists of a number of utilities that can be called from the shell prompt. See mh (1).

N.B. (1): Before running mh, you have to do some setup, using the command install-mh. This will modify your $PATH and install a default .mh_profile file (containing the options).

N.B. (2): Note that mh uses a different mailbox format from that used by most other mailers; converting an elm- or mail-folder to a mh-folder can be done using:

  inc +mhfolder -file elmfolder

Unfortunately, both elm and mh default to ~/Mail as your mail directory, so better take care not to overwrite something. Alternatively, edit the Path: entry in your .mh_profile file to have another location for mh-folders.

XMH

Xmh is a nice-looking X-interface to mh. You will still need to go through the install-mh phase, and you will also have to convert your folders, but otherwise it is a lot easier.

Mailtool

This is the Sun OpenWindows mail program, built around UNIX mail (it uses the same configuration options and mailbox format).

xmail

This is an X application, which works together with UNIX mail.

xmailtool

Another X-based mail reader.

tkmail

Another X-based mail reader (based on tk/tcl).

netscape mail

This is part of the Netscape program (it cannot be started separately, only from within Netscape). Starting with Netscape 2.0, the mail facility offers everything the other X-based mail programs offer, plus of course a direct link to Netscape Navigator for WWW links in e-mails, and to Netscape News for newsgroups.

David.Jansen@strw.leidenuniv.nl

Last modified: Thu Dec 4 13:01:06 1997