Using Email
Email is what most people use our unix machines for so you might as
well get good at it. If you are unfamiliar with sending email, I
suggest chosing pine.
This program will make using email a whole lot easier because it is
menu driven and can be run over regular text-based logins. Other
chooses are the classic Unix Mail, mail, and mailx
commands and elm.
If you will always be reading your email from an X-windows terminal or
will always read your mail from one specific PC or Mac, then one
reader you may wish to try is Netscape
Mail, which is builtin to the WWW browser Netscape. If you are running
Netscape on a PC or MAC, then you will need to configure it to
POP your mail from physics.wm.edu. A big disadvantage of this
method is that unless your PC or MAC has a way to access its files
across the network, you can read your mail from anywhere else. Other
X-windows based mail readers for use only on the physics machine are
dtmail and mailtool.
Managing your email
After a while, you will have received a lot of email. You will
probably want to save some of it. If you just leave it in your
mailbox, your mailbox will become unwieldly just as it would if you
left all your snail mail in your mail box. Finding messages will
become difficult. The answer is to save mail that you want to keep
to a series of sorted folders (a folder is a file containing email
messages). In pine if you select s (for save) from the Folder
Index, pine will prompt you to save the message to a folder. The
default folder is "saved-messages" but you can create new folders with
whatever name you like. Saving and/or deleting mail is important
because if the disk on physics that contains all 200 users email fills
up, no one will receive any new mail.
Finding an email address
Finding out someone's email address when you don't
know it to start with is hard to impossible. Here's a list of things you
can try to locate an email address:
- If you know the name of the computer on which your recipient has their
account, you can use finger command. Try
finger lastname@name.of.computer. This should return a bunch of
information about everyone with "lastname" on name.of.computer including
their usernames. Many sites disable this command because it is a security
hole.
- If finger didn't work or you only know the institution at which
your recipient has their account, you can use your www viewer to
snoop around their institutions web and gopher pages looking for
information on your recipient (phonebooks and student/faculty listings
are common).
- If visiting your recipient's site's web and gopher pages was fruitless,
try the
Email Address Search option from the
Useful Links page on the W& M Physics dept homepage.
- If you're still having trouble, pick up the phone and give the
person a call.
Department Addresses
The following are useful Physics Department specific addresses.
- department@physics.wm.edu
- Will distribute your message to all members of the physics department
and also several "friends" of the department.
- undergrads@physics.wm.edu
- Will distribute your message to all undergrads with physics accounts.
- gradstudents@physics.wm.edu
- Will distribute your message to all graduate students with physics accounts.
- faculty@physics.wm.edu
- Will distribute your message to all faculty members.
- staff@physics.wm.edu
- Will distribute your message to all Physics staff members with email accounts.
- webmaster@physics.wm.edu
- Will forward your message to whoever is in charge of the physics
web pages and physics computers in general.
- help@physics.wm.edu
- Will forward your message to all members of the help mailing list. Good place
to ask computing questions since several knowledgable people will be
reading the list. Everyone is welcome to join the list.
Last modified 9/12/96
College of William and Mary, Dept. of Physics
raines@physics.wm.edu