ELM Tutorial

Elm is a sophisticated, full-screen mail system for interactively handling electronic mail. Elm is a very easy system to use. To start elm from a shell prompt, simply type `elm'. The main elm screen will pop up, listing each of your incoming messages and a short menu of common commands.

Reading Mail.

To select a message, either type the number of that message followed by <Return>, or use the arrow keys (or the `k' and `j' keys) to move up and down the list.

To read a message, first select the message and then hit <Return>. Then, pressing the space bar will scroll an entire page at a time; pressing <Return> will scroll one line at a time. Pressing <Return> at the bottom of a message will redisplay the same message. Pressing <Space> at the bottom of a message will display the next message. Pressing `i' will return to the main elm screen.

Replying to Mail.

To reply to a message, select the message and type `r' from the main screen. The recipient of the message is assumed to be the person who sent you the original message, but other than that, the process is identical to sending a normal message (described below).

Saving and Disposing of Mail.

To save a message to a file, select the message to save and press `s'. You will be prompted for a filename. After you enter the filename, the message will be saved and marked for with a `D' for deletion from your mailbox. To simply delete a message from your mailbox without saving it, select the message to delete and press `d'. The message will be marked with a `D' for deletion. When you exit, you will be asked to confirm deletion; to delete the marked items, type `y' when prompted.

Sending Mail.

To mail a message to someone else, type `m' from the main screen. At the prompt, type the email address (or alias) of the person to whom the letter should be sent. At the next prompt, type a subject line for the message. If you want to send a copy of your message to someone other than the main recipient, type their name(s) at the `Copies to:' prompt, separated by commas if more than one name is given. Next, you will automatically enter your editor program (e.g., Joe, emacs, or vi) to compose the text of your message. (Refer to the documentation or manual pages for your editor). Then type your message, save it, and exit the editor. You will then be given the choices of either re-editing the message you just wrote, editing the mail headers to change things such as the subject line, sending the message as is, or just forgetting the whole thing and not sending the letter at all.

Exiting.

To exit elm, press `q' from the main screen, and answer any questions it asks you (no more than two, depending on what you did while in elm).

Other Commands.

Other commands are listed in the menu on the main elm screen, in the man page for elm (type `man elm' from a shell prompt), or in the file `/usr/local/doc/elm/Users.guide'. There is a newsgroup about elm, `comp.mail.elm', where you can also learn more and ask questions.

Customizing.

To customize your personal elm configuration, type `o' from the main elm screen. Follow the directions to change any options you like, then press `>' to save the configuration. The elm configuration is stored in the file `elmrc' in the `.elm' directory under your home directory. Additional customizations can be made by editing that file directly. Make any changes carefully.

Aliases.

Elm has the ability to define aliases for hard-to-remember or frequently used email addresses or lists of addresses. These aliases are stored in the file `.elm/aliases.text'. If you want to set up some aliases you will need to create or edit this file using your text editor. This is an example file: 
	# Comments start with a '#' symbol.
	# Blank lines are ignored.
	# Multiple spaces within aliases don't matter.


	# Format:
	# alias = Real Life Name = name1@machine1, name2@machine2


	me   = Yours Truly = me@some.machine
	john = John Doe    = jdoe@some.machine
	us   = Our Group   = me, john
	them = Bad Guys    = tom@that.machine, dick@that.machine,
	                     harry@that.machine
	everyone = All of us = us, them
The lines beginning with `#' are comments. After creating or changing the aliases.text file, run the program `newalias' from the Unix shell. This will create several other files in your `.elm' directory, and is necessary in order for elm to interpret your aliases. Once this has been done, you will be able to send mail to (using the above example) `them' rather than specifying Tom's, Dick's, and Harry's email addresses explicitly.

MIME Attachments.

Question:
I occasionally receive mail with attachments than have a M next to the message. Is there a way I can extract the attachment when reading mail using elm? I can read the mail by logging on via PPP and using Eudora, but I can't read the mail message using elm when logged in from the UNIX shell.

Answer:
Sure. Elm (and many other mail readers) use a program called 'metamail' to read MIME-encoded messages. If you want to use metamail to do something other than the standard method of reading, you simply pipe the message to metamail and give the appropriate arguments.

To save each MIME part into a separate file, first select the message in elm and then type: 

	|metamail -w
(that's a vertical bar, which initiates the 'pipe' function). Metamail will prompt you for a filename into which to store each part of the message. Viola!

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Last updated 4/04/96