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You can send and receive Internet E-mail from your account on the Genetics computer. Your E-mail address is username@genetics.wayne.edu (substitute your own username). To send mail to someone, you must know the recipient's Internet address. For example, my name and address are dwomble@genetics.wayne.edu . To send mail to local users of the Genetics computer, the complete address is not required, e.g. my username dwomble is sufficient to address a message to me. You may use either the PINE email program or a POPMail program such as Eudora or Netscape Mail for sending or receiving E-mail with the Genetics computer.

PINE E-MAIL SYSTEM

The PINE email system is available on the Genetics computer. To start the program, from the genetics% prompt type pine and press enter. Funtions are listed in a menu at the bottom of the screen. A most useful command is ? for HELP. Help is always available anywhere within pine. Read help from the main menu to get a general introduction to the features of the pine email program. Pine may also be started from the main menu of HYBROW.

You have a file in your home directory called .pinerc which contains information used by pine each time you start it. You can customize parts of the program, such as automatically including your "signature", by editing .pinerc (read the pine help screens for further information).

When you are finished with pine, type q and press enter (i.e. QUIT).

SENDING MESSAGES

To send a message, press C for COMPOSE. Fill in the blanks To: and Subject: and press enter after each. Fill in the other blanks or just press enter until you are in the message section. Type your message. The lines will wrap around the margins automatically. You can EDIT any part of the message at any time using the arrow and backspace keys. Pine uses the text editor PICO, which you can also use to edit other files. Several commands are listed at the bottom of the screen. You can insert an already existing file at the cursor position with ^R (i.e. hold down the control key and press r). To send the message, press ^X.

You may jump directly to the compose window of pine from the genetics% prompt by typing pine username@address and pressing enter.

READING YOUR MESSAGES

When you first logon, if you have new mail the system will tell you "you have new mail". To READ your mail, type pine and press enter. Press I to see the index of messages. Use the arrow keys to select a message and press enter to read it. Functions and help are listed at the bottom of the screen. Press N to read the next message, or I to return to the Index.

You may jump directly to the compose window of pine from the genetics% prompt by typing pine username@address and pressing enter.

PRINTING MESSAGES

To print the current message to the printer attached to your PC or Mac, press the Y key, then press enter. Be sure that your printer is already turned on and ready to print.

REPLYING TO SENDER

To REPLY to a message (i.e. to send a message back to the person who sent a message to you), type R, then follow the prompts. Type your reply and send it as above. You may also FORWARD messages to other people.

FOLDER LIST

Messages that you save and copies of messages that you have sent are stored in a FOLDER LIST, available from the main menu by pressing L. To REVIEW old messages, press L from the main menu, use the arrow keys to select a folder, and then press enter to see the index of messages in that folder. You may then view, delete, print, etc. the messages in that folder. As usual, functions are listed in the menu at the bottom of the screen.

OTHER USEFUL PINE FUNCTIONS

Other options include SAVING, DELETING, or PRINTING messages on the printer attached to your PC or Mac, or EXPORTING a message to a file in your home directory. You may also ATTACH FILES to send to other people.

POPMAIL

You may also use POPMail software on your own PC or Mac to receive and send E-mail, using Genetics as the Postmaster. Examples of POPMail programs include Eudora and Netscape Mail. In the Preferences menu of your POPMail program, set both POP3 Server and SMTP Server to genetics.wayne.edu

One important point about POPMail: your messages will be stored on your PC or Mac hard disk instead of on Genetics. Therefore, your messages will be only as secure as your PC, i.e. anyone with access to your PC will have access to the messages you have stored.

NB: If you want to read your E-mail messages from multiple locations, such as from your office and from home, you can set your POPMail program to leave the messages on the server. Just remember to delete your messages from the server at regular intervals with the PINE program, such as once a month.

AUTOMATIC FORWARDING OF E-MAIL

If you have more than one E-mail address, you can have all of your E-mail forwarded to a single address. For example, you could have all of your mail forwarded automatically to Genetics and then you would only have to check there for all of your messages. You would not have to tell all of your E-mail correspondents your new address, because the forwarding would be automatic. However, as you correspond with other people, you could let them know of your new address if you wish to do so. To have messages automatically forwarded from Genetics to another address, use a text editor to create a file called .forward (note the . in front) that contains on one line:
username@address
i.e. where you want the messages to go.

If you have questions, call David Womble at 7-2374 or send E-mail to dwomble@genetics.wayne.edu

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Send comments to: dwomble@genetics.wayne.edu

Copyright © 2001, David D. Womble.