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Chapter 17: Automating Your Office Gossip
Overview
In This Chapter
What is e-mail?
What are e-mail addresses?
Where is your mailbox?
Using the Pine program
Using the mail program
Reading your mail with Mozilla
Reading your mail with KMail
Reading your mail with Evolution
Electronic mail (or e-mail) is the high-tech way to automate interoffice chatter, gossip, and innuendo. Using e-mail, you can quickly and efficiently circulate memos and other written information to your coworkers, including directions to the beer bash this Saturday and the latest bad jokes. You can even send and receive e-mail from people outside your organization, if you and they use networked computers.If your organization uses e-mail, you probably already have some. In fact, vitally important but unread mail may be waiting in your mailbox at this very moment. Probably not, but who knows? You can tell whether unread messages are in your mailbox because UNIX displays this message when you log in: You have mail.
Actually, you might have mail even if it doesn’t say so — the UNIX system is just telling you whether any mail is on the local hard drive. If you’re using your UNIX system as a home desktop, and you dial up to an ISP, then you may have mail on its server, which you need to download. In this chapter, we discuss local e-mail and remote e-mail separately. Local e-mail is what you use on a typical UNIX machine that is part of a network, such as a corporate or university environment. Remote e-mail is what you use on a home machine running UNIX.
E-mail isn’t the only way to gossip. There’s also Usenet news. You can read Usenet news using Mozilla — one of the e-mail clients we discuss here, although you’re better off with a dedicated newsreader if you read much mail. We recommend trn , which is incredibly flexible, but more than a little confusing at first. Some people swear by tin and nn . Newsreaders tend to have short names, and be command-line programs. A lot of newsreaders are out there; almost as many as e-mail clients.Usenet has gradually decayed under swarms of spammers and binary newsgroups (newsgroups where people post huge files, instead of discussing anything), and a lot of people have written it off, yet pockets of Usenet are still usable. Look for moderated groups, or groups with very specialized topics.Not sure what Usenet has to offer? The Google Groups area is an interface to Usenet; point a browser at http://groups.google.com/ and poke around.For general information about Usenet newsgroups, see our Usenet page at net.gurus. com/usenet/ .To use Usenet, you need these three Important News Skills:
How to read the news that interests you
How not to read the news that doesn’t interest you, because much more news is sent every day than any single human can ever read
How to post articles of your own (definitely optional)
If you start reading news, learn to use the kill file early. It’s the only way to stay sane — or so we’re told, by people who are still sane.
