Mail and News Clients in Software

Generate ANSI/AIM Code 39 in Software Mail and News Clients

messages you have already read are placed in a file called mbox in your home directory Instead of saving messages in the mbox file, you can use the s command to save a message explicitly to a file of your choice Mail has its own initialization file, called mailrc, that is executed each time Mail is invoked, for either sending or receiving messages Within it, you can define Mail options and create Mail aliases You can set options that add different features to Mail, such as changing the prompt or saving copies of messages you send To define an alias, you enter the keyword alias, followed by the alias you have chosen and then the list of addresses it represents In the next example, the alias myclass is defined in the mailrc file mailrc

In the next example, the contents of the file homework are sent to all the users whose addresses are aliased by myclass

As your mail messages are received, they are automatically placed in your mailbox file, but you are not automatically notified when you receive a message You can use a mail client to retrieve any new messages, or you can use a mail monitor tool to tell you if you have any mail waiting Several mail notification tools are also available, such as gnubiff and Mail Notification Mail Notification will support Gmail, as well as Evolution (for Evolution, install the separate plug-in package) When you first log in after Mail Notification has been installed, the Mail Notification configuration window is displayed Here you can add new mail accounts to check, such as Gmail accounts, as well as set other features like summary pop-ups When you receive mail, a Mail icon will appear in the notification applet of your panel Move your cursor over it to check for any new mail Clicking it will display the Mail Notification configuration window, though you can configure this to go directly to your email application gnubiff will notify you of any POP3 or IMAP mail arrivals The KDE Desktop has a mail monitor utility called Korn that works in much the same way Korn shows an empty inbox tray when there is no mail and a tray with slanted letters in it when mail arrives If old mail is still in your mailbox, letters are displayed in a neat square You can set these icons as any image you want You can also specify the mail client to use and the polling interval for checking for new mail If you have several mail accounts, you can set up a Korn profile for each one Different icons can appear for each account, telling you when mail arrives in one of them For command line interfaces, you can use the biff utility The biff utility notifies you immediately when a message is received This is helpful when you are expecting a message and want to know as soon as it arrives Then biff automatically displays the header and beginning lines of messages as they are received To turn on biff, you enter biff y on the command line To turn it off, you enter biff n To find out if biff is turned on, enter biff alone You can temporarily block biff by using the mesg n command to prevent any message displays on your screen The mesg n command not only stops any Write and Talk messages, it also stops biff and Notify messages Later, you can unblock biff with a mesg y command A mesg n command comes in handy if you don t want to be disturbed while working on some project