07.Mail

07.Mail

MAIL

The electronic mail that you send and receive on MindVox is very similar to the concept of sending and receiving physical letters, or "snail mail" in the language of the realm.  You need to have some idea of WHO you are sending mail to, and what their address is.  You also need to know who YOU are, and what your "home" address is, so that your friends, enemies, and junk-mailers can find you and fill up your mailbox with lots of STUFF. 

Mail on MindVox falls into two basic categories; local mail, and letters that come in, or go out, over the Internet.  We'll begin with local mail because, well, its a lot simpler, and my brain hasn't acknowledged the coffee thats just now hitting my bloodstream, so I'm not quite warmed up enough to explain why something like dude!mindvox!phantom.com is supposed to make any sense to you. 

LOCAL MAIL (LETTERS TO ANOTHER PERSON WHO ALSO LIVES ON MINDVOX)

As you probably know by now, you have an individual user ID, sometimes reffered to as UID, or just your name.  This is what you type at the login: prompt, and has two basic characteristics, which are: its all lowercase, and must be shorter than 8 characters in length, because a long time ago 3 guys sitting in a room someplace that isn't HERE, decided that if you can't think up a unique name that's shorter then 8 characters, you're a blithering dunderhead and don't deserve to use Unix anyway, much less send anyone email, so like, get outta here and go play with MSDOS.  

Uhmmm, anyway, for the sake of explanation, we're going to refer to you as a "member" because if you're reading this, you probably ARE a member of MindVox, and besides that, it makes various jokes reffering to body parts a lot eaisier to slip in later in the text. 

When you first login MindVox will tell you who are in the opening screen, which displays something like: 

        _______________________________________________________________

                Your Identity on MindVox is:  member@phantom.com
        _______________________________________________________________

You can also type:  whoami  at the [Main Menu]: prompt and get a similar answer: 

[Main Menu]: whoami

-=]) Your full MindVox Address is:  member@mindvox.phantom.com

"member" will be replaced with whatever name you chose to login with, while "phantom.com" will ALWAYS be at the end of it, since phantom is the name of the domain that MindVox lives in, and .com refers to its designation, which is COMmercial access.  "mindvox" will sometimes be present in your mail path, and sometimes not.  This really depends on which of the several dozen programs that work with mail, has touched your message as it passed through them.  As a rule of thumb its never NECESSARY to include the mindvox part, because MindVox has something called "smart addressing" and anything thrown at "@phantom.com" from another machine, will be sorted out internally like a miniture post office, and MindVox will figure out where your mailbox lives (there are about a dozen machines in the phantom domain at this time, mindvox is the name of one of them.)



Sending mail to a member of mindvox 

sending mail to someone on the internet
using uucp
into the commercial online services (lift from hlp.gateways)

using mailing lists


using the aliases file


Composing the text of your letter 
online (using editors, see section for creating text files/picking editors)
loading the text of your letter from home
uploading the text of your letter TO HOME

file attachments

Managing your mailboxes,
your mail directory (should be in /Mail)

Using a mail Interface, 

MindVox
Elm
Pine

Editing headers
following up
forwarding mail

misc mail commands, moving towards custom and more obscure stuff.

deleting messages, ranges of messages, and mailboxes.

