When you get an account on a machine which is on the Internet, you possess a worldwide Internet mail address. An e-mail address is comprised of the login id (also called userid or user name), the "@" symbol, and the domain name of the machine. If your Alachua Free-Net login id is "afn00999", then your e-mail address is:
afn00999@afn.org
You can check your e-mail address by selecting option 5 - "What is my Internet mail address?" on the mail menu. When someone is logged into freenet they can send e-mail to you by just using your login id (the system default is to assume the login refers to a user on the same domain) or using a shorthand version of your address like afn00999@freenet2. People on other machines can send e-mail to you by using the address listed above but can't send to afn00999@freenet2as this requires that they already are logged into freenet.
A mail reader is a program which handles reading, storing, deleting, and sending mail. Free-Net currently offers the pine program for reading mail from the text menu, option 1.
A mail folder is a file which contains e-mail messages which have been grouped together for some reason. It is common to have a folder named received created by the system to hold all the e-mail you have already read but did not choose to delete. You can also group e-mail into folders according to topics and/or sender. It is a way to save mail into folders which have a name associated with it so you can remember what is in there (e.g. volleyball, admin, whitehouse, jokes, thingstodo, etc).
The easiest way for you to do this is to include a copy to yourself on each note you choose to save, by entering your own e-mail address on the CC: line of the mail message. When the mail is then delivered back to you, you can save it into a separate folder. Common names for this folder are: sent, sent-mail, copies, fcc, or your username (e.g. afn00000). The pine mail program can automatically store mail you send in a sent-mail folder. However, this is strongly discouraged, since it requires that you then do recurring maintenance on your sent-mail folder to keep it from growing with each note you send, adding to disk usage. If you consider this necessary for your use of the e-mail system, use "S" (SETUP) from the pine main menu, then "C" (CONFIG), then use the cursor down-arrow to highlight "default-fcc" (fcc stands for filed carbon copy), then "A" to add a value for the name of the mail folder where you want your outgoing mail automatically stored. Set default-cc="" to suppress automatic fcc of sent mail.
Mail sent across the Internet to another user or even sent to another user on the same machine, will deliver the mail whenever possible. If for any reason it can not deliver the e-mail, the mail program returns the mail with an appropriate message noting the reason for the failure, back to the sender. This is commonly called bounced mail.
If a machine addressed by the e-mail is known to exist on Internet, but due to the machine being "down" or the route to the machine being "down", the Free-Net mailer will queue up the mail and attempt for 3 days to contact the appropriate machine and deliver the mail (checking every 2-4 hours to see if the machine is back up yet). At the end of this period of time it will give up and return the bounced mail to the user.
This is bounced mail (see #5 above). Look for the reason that the mail did not get sent. Check especially the address used, make any adjustments and try forwarding the mail back to the user again. If it was not a mistake/typo on your end, forward the error message only to postmaster and ask for a reason and we'll try to check it out and explain it.
If a machine is addressed by e-mail which Free-Net can not locate
on the Internet, the mail is bounced immediately. This usually comes
back with the error message:
can not find host: yyyyyy
-where xxx@yyyyyy was the address you were trying to use.
If a user of a particular machine is not registered by that machine as being a valid mail recipient, Free-Net bounces the mail immediately.
unknown user : xxx
-where xxx is the user you were attempting to send e-mail to.
When the mail disk fills up on a machine which is trying to accept mail, the mail bounces immediately with the following error message:
cannot append to /usr/spool/mail/zzz
or no space left on device
-where zzz is the user you were attempting to send e-mail to.
An editor is like a crude wordprocessor. Free-Net currently offers 3 editors: penove, pico, and elvis. Pico is the default. The editor is brought up any time that you wish to compose e-mail, post on any of the newsgroups/bulletin boards on Free-Net, or edit any of your files.
To change your editor, go into Option 2 on the Main menu (Setting Up...) and choose Option 4 (Customize Your Environment). It will show you the things you can tailor to suit your own needs on Free-Net.
Elvis is a very cryptic and user-unfriendly editor that many unixtypes find similar to an old unix editor named vi. Free-Net admin caution novice users from selecting this editor as the support and help available for this editor is limited.
When you send e-mail, you will get prompts titled 'To:' and 'CC:'. On either or both of these fields you may enter as many e-mail addresses (separated by spaces or commas) as you like.
example: w - to write e-mail
To: wood@freenet, afn00999, az123@freenet.HSC.Colorado.edu,
woodd@firnvx.firn.edu
CC: problems@freenet.fsu.edu abc134@dirac.scri.fsu.edu
would send out at least 6 copies of this e-mail (and as problems is a mail alias on freenet pointing to another 10 people, it is actually about 16 copies of this e-mail).
If you regularly send e-mail to the same 10 people you may want to look at creating a personal mail alias.
If they reply you know they got it. Otherwise, unless you get a bounce message they probably got it. There is no way to tell 100% that mail was delivered. The success ratio is way above 99%, but e-mail does sometimes get lost due to the fact that it goes through many different machines to reach it's final destination and most of them are running different versions of everything and sometimes errors occur.
An alias is a way to group one or a bunch of e-mail recipients into a shorthand name. It is also referred to as an individual's personal Address Book. A user can make entries into their address book. You can shorten a long, oft-forgotten address like belinda@wiretap.champaign.illinois.com to 'mom'. Or create a list of users which you refer to as 'friends'.
A user creates their own aliases. A personal e-mail alias is only valid for the user who created it (therefore do not publish the e-mail address as officers@freenet.fsu.edu for others to use).
If they are a Free-Net user, the easiest way is to list the Users (found by entering #3 from the Mail menu, or entering u from the elm mailer). Keyword Search will allow you to enter part or all of their name and all the users matching this criteria will be displayed. The first column is this persons e-mail address on freenet (also known as userid or login id).
If they do not have an account on Free-Net, the best way to find their e-mail address is to call them up and ask them to give it to you. With 20,000,000 Internet users & it growing daily, there is not a single source to go to to find this information.
Another highly successful way to find out an e-mail address is to provide yours first, and ask them to send you e-mail. You can then look at the From: field of your message to see what their e-mail address is. This works most of the time, even when the other person knows they have Internet mail but does not know what their address is.
If the person has an account on a machine which runs gopher, you can usually connect to the gopher and find an item which is listed as "Yellow Pages" or "Directory". Most universities, research institutions and some government agencies are already running Gophers and more are coming online with them daily.
With the pine mailer you can include binary data as well as text data using the Attchmnt line. The elm program does not include this feature. It is against copyright laws to distribute programs this way unless you have the required license.
When you create a pine message, after filling in the "To" and "CC" lines and with the cursor at the "Attchmnt" line, press <Ctrl+T> to go to the file browse screen. Highlight the file you want to add as an attachment, then press <Enter>. You can repeat this process for as many files as you want to attach.
To view or save an attachment someone else has sent to you, use the "V" command when viewing the note. The program then asks the attachment number to view or save and tells you the possible choices. When you enter the number of the attachment you want, you are given a choice of save or view. Enter s for save, then enter the filename you want for the file to be placed in your home directory, or v for view.
It means that you do not want to read your e-mail from the account you have on Free-Net, but instead you want to forward your mail to another account you use more often and read it there.
If a user has a signature file, it is appended to the end of each and every e-mail that user sends. It is also appended to the end of each newsgroup/bulletin board posting that user does. It can be any format. Often people include their phone numbers, business addresses, e-mail address, a favorite quote or lyrics from a favorite song. It is a way of personalizing impersonal e-mail.
The freenet system currently truncates all but the first 5 lines of a signature when including it in newsgroup/bulletin board postings.
You create a signature file by entering option #7 on the mail menu. The system will bring up the editor on a file named .signature and you can enter anything you want at that time.
The system creates your mailboxes so that only you and system administrators of the system (currently 3) have read permission on your files. None of the system administrators will violate the privacy of your e-mail unless you specifically ask that we go in to fix something wrong with the mailbox (rare request). This does not mean that your mail is guaranteed to be private.
We attempt to insure that your mail private but can not guarantee that this is so.
Corrupted mailboxes occur when a user edits their mailbox and inadvertantly inserts characters which the mail program can not interpret. To fix this system administrators can edit the file & delete these characters or delete the whole mailbox depending on whichever the user requests).
Look at option 6 on the mail menu. If the total of the 3 system places for holding mail exceeds 500K (500,000 Bytes) you are using too much space for e-mail.
Highlight the mail message by moving to that message. Press f (to forward the message). The system will prompt you as to the e-mail address you would like to send the message to. It also gives you the option of editing the outgoing message (in case you'd like to insert a line telling them why you are forwarding the message, or in case you only want to forward part of the message).
When sending mail to an e-mail address without a machine name component (to free-adm versus free-adm@freenet.scri.fsu.edu), the system searches the password file to find out if the user is a valid user. As our password file is over 1MB large and growing, you can "trick" the system into postponing this verification until it tries to deliver the mail by following the e-mail name with @freenet).
Example:
Send Message to: problems@freenet is faster than
Send Message to: problems
Bring up the mail file you want to delete from (incoming is the default mailbox or change folder to one of your folders).
Press d next to each message you want to delete. A "d" appears to the left of each message you have marked for deletion.
Exit mail with a q (to quit mail). The system will prompt: "Delete messages? ". Enter a y. The system default is no, so you must press a y to have the messages deleted.
If you mark an e-mail message for deletion and then change your mind before exiting mail, enter the mail message number to take your cursor to this mail message, and press u to undelete the message. The "d" on the lefthandside of the message should disappear.
Press s to save messages. A download menu will appear that looks something like:
Entering download facility
Options 1-7 are transfer protocols to be used to download to your own PC/Mac. Enter an option 1-7 and then press the return key.
Next press the download key on your PC/Mac. (Again this key is specific to the Telecommunications software you are using. Usually it is a Page_Down, or Down Arrow key like in Procomm, or ^r (control key and r simultaneously for receive file) as in Telix. Select the same protocol as selected above.
If you are coming into Free-Net via FIRN you can only use #5 (Kermit) or #7 (Ascii) as this is a 7bit connection.
If you are using Telix and select Zmodem you do not have to tell the PC that you are transferring a file, it will determine this automatically and choose a file name to save it to.
If you have problems choose #10 and read the help file before sending any e-mail. Usually the problem lies in the settings of your modem, telecommunications software, or that the protocol you selected is not valid with your type of settings/connection.
Option 8 is included as this is a general menu brought up. It makes no sense to select this option from mail, as you could simply forward the message with an f.
Option 9 will store the mail message on Free-Net's hard disk. This is useful for including it in a later mail message or for editing later.
If you are using the default mailer (pine) and the default editor (pico) then use the following procedure.
First make sure the file is in ascii format (sometimes called dos or text files). If you are using a word processor such as WordPerfect or Word For Windows, there are commands in the file or output options which will take the Wordprocessing commands out of a file and convert it to ascii text. You may have to edit the file to remove underlines, bold, italics, and other features as the Free-Net system will not recognize these characters and may have problems uploading the file if they are present.
Because ascii upload protocol does not provide any error checking and recovery, if you are uploading very large documents, you may want to use one of the standard protocols such as xmodem, ymodem, zmodem or kermit.
Go into e-mail and select w to write a mail message. When the editor comes up, press ^t (hold the control key and press t for transfer a document). An upload menu that looks like the following is displayed:
Entering upload facility
1. Xmodem Text Upload
2. Xmodem Binary Upload
3. Kermit
4. ASCII - DO NOT USE THIS IN THE EDITOR!
5. Upload home directory file
Choose 1, 2, or 3 if you are uploading a file from your PC/Mac.
If coming in via the FIRN network or other VMS systems, you are only able to choose Kermit here, as it is the only protocol which is supported in 7-bit mode (FIRN is the Fl. Dept. of Ed. network).
Choose 5 if you are uploading a file from your Free-Net home directory that you had created or saved earlier.
Do not use 3 (use the procedure described in A above when in mail). This option is for uploading into newsgroups/bulletin boards only and does not work when in mail.
Once you've selected the protocol you desire by entering the correct number and pressing enter, you must now press the upload key that is used by your telecommunications software (Usually Page_Up, Up arrow, or ^s (control key and s simultaneously).
Match up the protocols (if you selected xmodem binary on Free-Net choose a matching xmodem binary on the PC/Mac). Press enter and the PC/Mac will ask for a file name. Enter the file name (example C:\MOM.DOC) and press enter.
The file should be uploaded and displayed on the editor screen.